Effects of amplified spontaneous emission noise of optical amplifiers on the phase noise of optically generated electrical signals

Abstract

The applications of optical amplifiers such as erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs) and semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) are inevitable in most optical transmission links. These optical amplifiers employed in a transmission link will provide amplification to the optical signals to be transmitted, at the same time the amplifiers will also add amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) noise to the amplified optical signals. In radio-over-fiber systems, optical links are used to distribute high quality radio frequency (RF) signal, microwave signal or millimeter-wave (mm-wave) signal over optical fiber for low loss long-distant transmission. In this paper, the effects of amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) noise of optical amplifiers on the quality of the optically generated electrical signals are theoretically studied.

Wideband Microwave Phase Noise Analyzer Based on All-Optical Microwave Signal Processing

“…Specifically, the measured phase noise floor reaches -132.16 dBc/Hz at a 10 kHz offset for the 5-km fiber. It should be noted that this result can be further improved if the use of an EDFA and a second OBPF is avoided [32] by using an LD with a higher output power and/or a Dpol-MZM with a smaller insertion loss [31]. Besides, if a low-speed PD with a bandwidth of several MHz and possibly higher sensitivity is applied, the measurement sensitivity is also expected to be improved.…”