Use of a sampled Bragg grating as an in-fiber optical resonator for the realization of a referencing optical frequency scale for WDM communications

Abstract

Standardization for absolute laser frequency assignment in projected dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) networks has become a very important issue. Recently, we have proposed a referencing scale of standard optical frequencies that are exact multiples of 100 GHz. Such a scale is independent of the atomic or molecular reference used to set the absolute value and is uniformly applicable to all spectral ranges. Here, we propose the use of sampled Bragg gratings to realize the optical resonator. This resonator is adaptable, robust, potentially cost efficient and readily compatible with the fiber network.