All-optical time-stretch digitizer

Abstract

We propose and demonstrate an all-optical time-stretch digitizer for real-time capture of ultrafast optical signals, beyond the bandwidths achievable by electronics. This approach uniquely combines four-wave mixing and photonic time-stretch technique to slow down and record high-speed optical signals. As a proof-of-concept, real-time recording of 40-Gb/s non-return-to-zero on-off-keying optical data stream is experimentally demonstrated using a stretch factor of 54 and 1.5-GHz back-end electronic bandwidth. We also report on the observation of dispersion penalty and its mitigation via single-sideband conversion enabled by an optical bandpass filter. Our technique may provide a path to real-time capture of ultrahigh-speed optical data streams.