Optical signal denoising through temporal passive amplification

Mitigating the stochastic noise introduced during the generation, transmission, and detection of temporal optical waveforms remains a significant challenge across many applications, including radio-frequency photonics, light-based telecommunications, spectroscopy, etc. The problem is particularly difficult for the weak-intensity signals often found in practice. Active amplification worsens the signal-to-noise ratio, whereas noise mitigation based on optical bandpass filtering attenuates further the waveform of interest. Additionally, current optical filtering approaches are not optimal for signal bandwidths narrower than just a few GHz. We propose a versatile concept for simultaneous amplification and noise mitigation of temporal waveforms, here successfully demonstrated on optical signals with bandwidths spanning several orders of magnitude, from the kHz to GHz scale. The concept is based on lossless temporal sampling of the incoming coherent waveform through Talbot processing. By reaching high gain factors ( > 100 ), we show the recovery of ultra-weak optical signals, with power levels below the detector threshold, additionally buried under a much stronger noise background. The method is inherently self-tracking, a capability demonstrated by simultaneously denoising four data signals in a dense wavelength division multiplexing scheme.