Optical millimeter wave generated by octupling the frequency of the local oscillator

Abstract

What we believe to be a new scheme to generate an optical millimeter wave with octupling of the local oscillator via a nested LiNbO<sub>3</sub> Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM) is proposed and implemented by numerical simulation. Since the response frequency of the modulator and the local frequency are largely reduced, the bandwidth requirement of the transmitter to the optical and electrical components is reduced greatly. Then, the parameters of the nested modulator are analyzed theoretically, and we find that both the extinction ratio of the MZM and the phase imbalance between its two arms have influence on the performance of the generated optical millimeter wave.