Widely Tunable Optical Local Oscillator Scheme for RF Photonic Down-Conversion

Abstract

We present a widely tunable all-optical local oscillator (LO) scheme using two ultra-low noise, single cavity stabilized semiconductor lasers. Our all-optical LO with low phase noise and wide 4–32 GHz tuning range is readily extendable beyond 100 GHz for flexible optical down-conversion of RF signals.