Dual-comb interferometric systems with high time accuracy have been realized for various applications. The flourishing ultralow noise dual-comb system promotes the measurement and characterization of relative timing jitter, thus improving time accuracy. With optical solutions, introducing an optical reference enables 105 harmonics measurements, thereby breaking the limit set by electrical methods; nonlinear processes or spectral interference schemes were also employed to track the relative timing jitter. However, such approaches operating in the time domain either require additional continuous references or impose stringent requirements on the amount of timing jitter. We propose a scheme to correct the relative timing jitter of a free-running dual-comb interferometry assisted by a Fabry–Pérot (F–P) cavity in the frequency domain. With high wavelength thermal stability provided by the F–P cavity, the absolute wavelength deviation in the operating bandwidth is compressed to <0.4 pm, corresponding to a subpicosecond sensitivity of pulse-to-pulse relative timing jitter. Also, Allan deviation of 10−10 is obtained under multiple coherent averaging, which lays the foundation for mode-resolved molecular spectroscopic applications. The spectral absorption features of hydrogen cyanide gas molecules at ambient temperature were measured and matched to the HITRAN database. Our scheme promises to provide new ideas on sensitive measurements of relative timing jitter.
With the advance of optical communication and silicon photonics, dispersion compensators based on chirped waveguide Bragg gratings (CWBG) have developed rapidly in recent years. Nowadays, the longest CWBG has reached 20.11 cm with the largest group delay and lowest propagation loss. However, its group delay is nonlinear due to linear width variation. Thus, the extra third-order dispersion existed and is hard to use for second-order dispersion compensation. In this work, we propose and experimentally demonstrate, for the first time, an on-chip circulator-free dispersion compensator based on silicon nitride (Si3N4) CWBG with large and linear group delay. The dispersion device comprises spiral multi-mode antisymmetric index-chirped waveguide Bragg gratings and an asymmetric directional coupler on an 800-nm-thick low-loss Si3N4 platform. It utilizes two mode conversions to avoid the optical fiber circulator. The width variation function is modified to achieve the linear variation of the effective refraction index while the period remains unchanged. At last, the CWBG-based dispersion compensator is applied in a time-lens system to realize frequency-totime mapping. This integrated device has great potential for diverse applications such as long-haul transmission links, pulse compression, and pulse shaping.
In recent years, spectral measurement systems based on dual-comb interferometers have attracted more and more attention due to their characteristics of large bandwidth, high resolution, and high frame rate. However, the requirement to maintain strict coherence between light sources greatly hinders the development and application of dual-comb spectroscopy (DCS) systems. In this work, we use the phase-shifted fiber Bragg grating (PS-FBG) and the broadband Fabry-Perot cavity (F-P cavity) to calibrate the relative frequency jitter between two combs instead of introducing other complex feedback control loops. In this way, a DCS system operating at a free-running state was proposed and experimentally demonstrated. With the calibration of the PS-FBG, a 100-MHz resolution over the range of more than 100 nm was achieved without distortion. Benefitting from the excellent wavelength thermal stability, we subsequently corrected wavelength deviation through the optical frequency division process, and the equivalent locking accuracy improved by about 167 times compared with the traditional electrical reference scheme. Finally, the spectral absorption measurement of hydrogen cyanide gas molecules was carried out which was in good consistency with the HITRAN database to verify the potential in molecular spectroscopy. Our scheme is also compatible with other platforms and band ranges and will provide new solutions for free-running DCS systems.
With advance of microwave systems, the optical delay line based on chirped Bragg grating waveguides (CBGWs) have attracted much attention in recent years. However, the loss limits the length of CBGW to achieve larger group delay (GD). In this work, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a novel circulator-free CBGW with low loss and large GD. This CBGW device consists of a 20.11-cm long spiral tapered antisymmetric Bragg grating waveguide (STABGW) and an asymmetric directional coupler (ADC), and is fabricated on a low-loss 800-nm-height silicon nitride platform. The CBGW is realized by linearly increasing the width of Bragg grating waveguide along the length, and its period keeps the same. In our design, the widths of STABGW at two ports are 1.8 and 2.2 μm, respectively and the period is 435 nm. The minimum radius of the waveguide wrapped into Archimedean spiral is 600 μm. The length of ADC is 25 μm, and the widths of two parallel waveguides are 2.3 and 1 μm, respectively, with a 300-nm gap. The experimental results show that a total GD of 2852 ps within the bandwidth of 23 nm is realized. The propagation loss in STABGW is 0.15 dB/cm, and the total insertion loss of the device is 5.4 dB at the wavelength of 1550 nm. The GD is the largest amount achieved by CBGW reported. This integrated device has great potential for diverse applications such as dispersion compensation, all-optical signal processing, and nonlinear optics
Dual-comb spectroscopy enables spectral measurement with large bandwidth spanning tens of nanometers, but it is limited to measuring absorption spectra and has to trade-off spectral resolution versus acquisition frame rate set by the repetition rate. Here, to alleviate these restrictions, we innovatively propose and demonstrate a hybrid dual-comb emission spectroscopy featuring a spectral resolution of 0.63 pm, a frame rate of 1 MHz, and a measurement bandwidth of 13.6 nm, simultaneously. A mode-locked fiber comb is harnessed to interrogate emission spectral features with high resolution via optical Fourier transform and a soliton microcomb serving as a probe pulse implement parallel multi-point sampling to significantly increase the acquisition rate by nearly 3 orders of magnitude from 1 kHz to 1 MHz. We believe that chip-scale microcombs will make the fast and high-resolution emission spectroscopy presented here a powerful tool for widespread applications.
High frame rate of a spectrometer is very important for studying rapidly changing transient phenomena. Dispersive time stretch can map spectral information in the time domain for measurement and thus have a high frame rate compared to conventional spectrometers. To measure the emission spectrum and obtain higher sensitivity, a converging time lens was introduced. The spectro-temporal analyzer realizes the Fourier transform of the incident light field at the focal dispersion position of the time lens, maps the spectral information of the signal to be measured to the time domain, and also realizes the real-time acquisition of the signal spectrum. To further improve the resolution for higher precision detection, a larger pump pulse bandwidth was used to obtain a larger time lens window. Meanwhile, the optical frequency comb with slightly different repetition frequencies is used to sample the focused signal based on four-wave mixing to reduce the sampling bandwidth requirement. On this basis, a parametric time-domain spectrometer based on asynchronous optical sampling was proposed, and the third-order dispersion of the system is compensated. After these operations, the spectral resolution was increased from 20 to 1 pm with a detection bandwidth of 24 nm and a frame rate of 1 kHz. Finally, the random lasing spectral dynamics of EDFA and the thermal drift of the resonance peak of a microring resonator were detected.
Dissipative Kerr solitons generated in microresonators driven by a continuous wave pump laser have promise for widespread applications in spectroscopy and telecommunications. From the perspective of basic physics research, DKSs exhibit rich nonlinear phenomena and serve as a unique platform to study nonlinear physics. In this paper, an optimized all-optical radio frequency (RF) spectrum analyzer, also named frequency domain light intensity spectrum analyzer (f-LISA), is used to characterize the various stable soliton states. Results show that the optimized f-LISA achieves a measurement bandwidth of 2.2 THz and a frame rate of 20.62 MHz. Therefore, the versatile RF spectral patterns of stable two-soliton states have successfully recorded by f-LISA. More importantly, the relative azimuthal angles between two solitons within the round-trip can be extracted by applying an inverse Fourier transform to the RF spectra, indicating that the ultra-fast and broadband RF spectral measurement enable the visualization of soliton motion. It is believed that the f-LISA can function as a powerful and useful tool to monitor the rich nonlinear dynamical phenomena such as soliton number switching in the microresonators
Dual-comb spectroscopy has become a powerful tool for spectral analysis because of its ultra-high resolution and fast frame rate. To capture the stable spectrum in the frequency domain, it is essential to lock the repetition frequency and the carrier envelope offset frequency of the mode-lock laser. By introducing a phase-lock loop to a piezoelectric ceramic based cavity, the repetition frequency can be easily synchronized to an external clock. To lock the carrier envelope offset frequency, a phase-shifted fiber Bragg grating with 132-MHz narrow pass band is introduced, and it is capable of filtering out single comb line of each comb. Therefore, the post-calibration signal for carrier envelope offset frequency can be obtained from the beating signal of the filtered adjacent comb lines. Based on this post-calibration scheme, a stabilized dual-comb spectroscopy is proposed and demonstrated with 120-nm observation bandwidth, 1-pm spectral resolution, and 100-Hz acquisition frame rate.
Autocorrelator, as a pulse measuring equipment, can effectively characterize pulse width and pulse waveform with high resolution. Limited by the refresh rate, conventional autocorrelator are incapable of capture the ultrafast processes of pulses, such as soliton transitions. In this paper, we proposed an ultrafast autocorrelator based on broadband radio frequency (RF) spectrum analyzer. The RF spectrum under test is firstly transformed to the continuous wave via the cross-phase modulation. Then the RF spectrum is mapped to the temporal domain through time stretch and finally measured by a real-time oscilloscope. The ultrafast autocorrelation trace is obtained from the inverse Fourier transform of the mapped RF spectrum. With the 60-GHz detected bandwidth of the photodetector adopted, the simulated ultrafast autocorrelator achieves the measurement rate of 50 MHz, the resolution of 300 fs, and the measuring window of 600 ps.
Spectroscopy is an essential tool to explore the interaction between light and matter. With the extensive study of ultrafast phenomena, ultrafast spectrum analysis is in great demand. In view of the limited acquisition frame rate of the conventional spectroscopy, the ultrafast temporal focusing mechanism was proposed and demonstrated, and it is capable of capturing arbitrary waveform signal, with the acquisition frame rate up to 100 MHz. Moreover, several approaches have been proposed to further improve its accuracy and bandwidth, it has achieved 2-pm spectral resolution and 58-nm observation bandwidth, and the observation range has been further extended to microwave and terahertz span. Furthermore, this spectroscopy has successfully characterized ultrafast phenomena and mechanisms of devices, and has been applied to several ultrafast spectral imaging systems.
In this paper, a structural illumination based technology for microscopic surface topography measurement is investigated, in which only one shot structural illumination image is grabbed and a more efficient optical sectioned image reconstruction algorithm based on Hilbert transform was proposed. Compared with other methods, the technology can avoid strip artefacts problems of in-focus images resulting from the sinusoidal phases mismatch in spatial domain in conventional three-step phase-shifting since the phase-shifting steps decreases from three to one, and the measurement time is decreased effectively. The experimental testing is carried out to verify the feasibility and its measurement accuracy.
As for chromatic confocal sensor system with limited computational capacity, a fast peak extraction algorithm with considerate accuracy is in urgent demand. However, current peak extraction algorithms such as the centroid algorithm (CA) and nonlinear fitting algorithms can not balance the accuracy and computational efficiency. Thus, we propose an accurate peak extraction algorithm with good computational efficiency called corrected differential fitting algorithm (CDFA). At first, the differential signal derived from the original axial response signal is linearly fitted for initial peak extraction. Then corresponding systematic error of this linear fitting operation is analyzed using a first-order linear nonhomogeneous differential equation. At last, error compensation, that is, the solution to this equation is implemented with an introduction of "sum differences of sampling intensity". The performance of CDFA is compared with two conventional peak extraction algorithms including the CA and Gaussian fitting algorithm (GFA) using Monte Carlo simulations. CDFA is found to have a comparable accuracy performance with GFA while have a much higher computational efficiency.
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