Periodic time-domain modulation for the electrically tunable control of optical pulse train envelope and repetition rate multiplication

© 2012 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. An electrically tunable system for the control of optical pulse sequences is proposed and demonstrated. It is based on the use of an electrooptic modulator for periodic phase modulation followed by a dispersive device to obtain the temporal Talbot effect. The proposed configuration allows for repetition rate multiplication with different multiplication factors and with the simultaneous control of the pulse train envelope by simply changing the electrical signal driving the modulator. Simulated and experimental results for an input optical pulse train of 10 GHz are shown for different multiplication factors and envelope shapes. © 2006 IEEE. Manuscript received August 31, 2010; revised November 26, 2010, December 30, 2010, and February 21, 2011; accepted March 22, 2011. Date of publication May 19, 2011; date of current version January 31, 2012. This work was supported in part by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion of Spain under Project TEC2007-68065-C03-01-02-03 and Project TEC2010-21305-C04-01 and -02. Tainta, S.; Erro Betran, MJ.; Amaya Ocampo, WA.; Garde. María José; Sales Maicas, S.; Muriel Fernandez, MA. (2012). Periodic time-domain modulation for the electrically tunable control of optical pulse train envelope and repetition rate multiplication. IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics. 18(1):377-383. https://doi.org/10.1109/JSTQE.2011.2140092