Broadband radio-frequency chirped waveforms (RFCWs) with dynamically tunable parameters are of fundamental interest to many practical applications. Recently, photonic-assisted solutions have been demonstrated to overcome the bandwidth and flexibility constraints of electronic RFCW generation techniques. However, state-of-the-art photonic techniques involve broadband mode-locked lasers, complex dual laser systems, or fast electronics, increasing significantly the complexity and cost of the resulting platforms. Here we demonstrate a novel concept for photonic generation of broadband RFCWs using a simple architecture, involving a single CW laser, a recirculating frequency-shifting loop, and standard low-frequency electronics. All the chirp waveform parameters, namely sign and value of the chirp rate, central frequency and bandwidth, duration and repetition rate, are easily reconfigurable. We report the generation of mutually coherent RF chirps, with bandwidth above 28 GHz, and time-bandwidth product exceeding 1000, limited by the available detection bandwidth. The capabilities of this simple platform fulfill the stringent requirements for real-world applications.
We propose and characterize experimentally a new source of optical frequency combs for performing multi-heterodyne spectrometry. This comb modality is based on a frequency-shifting loop seeded with a continuous-wave (CW) monochromatic laser. The comb lines are generated by successive passes of the CW laser through an acousto-optic frequency shifter. We report the generation of frequency combs with more than 1500 mutually coherent lines, without resorting to non-linear broadening phenomena or external electronic modulation. The comb line spacing is easily reconfigurable from tens of MHz down to the kHz region. We first use a single acousto-optic frequency comb to conduct self-heterodyne interferometry with a high frequency resolution (500 kHz). By increasing the line spacing to 80 MHz, we demonstrate molecular spectroscopy on the sub-millisecond time scale. In order to reduce the detection bandwidth, we subsequently implement an acousto-optic dual-comb spectrometer with the aid of two mutually coherent frequency shifting loops. In each architecture, the potentiality of acousto-optic frequency combs for spectroscopy is validated by spectral measurements of hydrogen cyanide in the near-infrared region.
Controlling the temporal and spectral properties of light is crucial for many applications. Current state-of-the-art techniques for shaping the time- and/or frequency-domain field of an optical waveform are based on amplitude and phase linear spectral filtering of a broadband laser pulse, e.g., using a programmable pulse shaper. A well-known fundamental constraint of these techniques is that they can be hardly scaled to offer a frequency resolution better than a few GHz. Here, we report an approach for user-defined optical field spectral shaping using a simple scheme based on a frequency shifting optical loop. The proposed scheme uses a single monochromatic (CW) laser, standard fiber-optics components and low-frequency electronics. This technique enables efficient synthesis of hundreds of optical spectral components, controlled both in phase and in amplitude, with a reconfigurable spectral resolution from a few MHz to several tens of MHz. The technique is applied to direct generation of arbitrary radio-frequency waveforms with time durations exceeding 100 ns and a detection-limited frequency bandwidth above 25 GHz.
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