Phase-coherent lightwave communications with frequency combs

Fiber-optical networks are a crucial telecommunication infrastructure in society. Wavelength division multiplexing allows for transmitting parallel data streams over the fiber bandwidth, and coherent detection enables the use of sophisticated modulation formats and electronic compensation of signal impairments. In the future, optical frequency combs may replace multiple lasers used for the different wavelength channels. We demonstrate two novel signal processing schemes that take advantage of the broadband phase coherence of optical frequency combs. This approach allows for a more efficient estimation and compensation of optical phase noise in coherent communication systems, which can significantly simplify the signal processing or increase the transmission performance. With further advances in space division multiplexing and chip-scale frequency comb sources, these findings pave the way for compact energy-efficient optical transceivers.Comment: 17 pages, 9 figure

Applications of Kalman Filters for Coherent Optical Communication Systems

In this chapter, we review various applications of Kalman filtering for coherent optical communication systems. First, we briefly discuss the principles of Kalman filter and its variations including extended Kalman filter (EKF) and adaptive Kalman filter (AKF). Later on, we illustrate the applicability of Kalman filters for joint tracking of several optical transmission impairments, simultaneously, by formulating the state space model (SSM) and detailing the principles. A detailed methodology is presented for the joint tracking of linear and nonlinear phase noise along with amplitude noise using EKF. Also, approaches to enhance the performance obtained by EKF by combining with other existing digital signal processing (DSP) techniques are presented. Frequency and phase offset estimation using a two stage linear Kalman filter (LKF)/EKF is also discussed. A cascaded structure of LKF and EKF by splitting the SSM to jointly mitigate the effects of polarization, phase and amplitude noise is also presented. The numerical analysis concludes that the Kalman filter based approaches outperform the conventional methods with better tracking capability and faster convergence besides offering more feasibility for real-time implementations

Nanophotonic soliton-based microwave synthesizers

Microwave photonic technologies, which upshift the carrier into the optical domain to facilitate the generation and processing of ultrawide-band electronic signals at vastly reduced fractional bandwidths, have the potential to achieve superior performance compared to conventional electronics for targeted functions. For microwave photonic applications such as filters, coherent radars, subnoise detection, optical communications and low-noise microwave generation, frequency combs are key building blocks. By virtue of soliton microcombs, frequency combs can now be built using CMOS compatible photonic integrated circuits, operated with low power and noise, and have already been employed in system-level demonstrations. Yet, currently developed photonic integrated microcombs all operate with repetition rates significantly beyond those that conventional electronics can detect and process, compounding their use in microwave photonics. Here we demonstrate integrated soliton microcombs operating in two widely employed microwave bands, X- and K-band. These devices can produce more than 300 comb lines within the 3-dB-bandwidth, and generate microwave signals featuring phase noise levels below 105 dBc/Hz (140 dBc/Hz) at 10 kHz (1 MHz) offset frequency, comparable to modern electronic microwave synthesizers. In addition, the soliton pulse stream can be injection-locked to a microwave signal, enabling actuator-free repetition rate stabilization, tuning and microwave spectral purification, at power levels compatible with silicon-based lasers (<150 mW). Our results establish photonic integrated soliton microcombs as viable integrated low-noise microwave synthesizers. Further, the low repetition rates are critical for future dense WDM channel generation schemes, and can significantly reduce the system complexity of photonic integrated frequency synthesizers and atomic clocks