Resonant electro-optic frequency comb

Alfredo Rueda, Florian Sedlmeir, Madhuri Kumari, Gerd Leuchs and Harald G. L. Schwefel ()
Additional contact information
Alfredo Rueda: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light
Florian Sedlmeir: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light
Madhuri Kumari: The Dodd-Walls Centre for Photonic and Quantum Technologies
Gerd Leuchs: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light
Harald G. L. Schwefel: The Dodd-Walls Centre for Photonic and Quantum Technologies

Nature, 2019, vol. 568, issue 7752, 378-381

Abstract: Abstract High-speed optical telecommunication is enabled by wavelength-division multiplexing, whereby hundreds of individually stabilized lasers encode information within a single-mode optical fibre. Higher bandwidths require higher total optical power, but the power sent into the fibre is limited by optical nonlinearities within the fibre, and energy consumption by the light sources starts to become a substantial cost factor1. Optical frequency combs have been suggested to remedy this problem by generating numerous discrete, equidistant laser lines within a monolithic device; however, at present their stability and coherence allow them to operate only within small parameter ranges2–4. Here we show that a broadband frequency comb realized through the electro-optic effect within a high-quality whispering-gallery-mode resonator can operate at low microwave and optical powers. Unlike the usual third-order Kerr nonlinear optical frequency combs, our combs rely on the second-order nonlinear effect, which is much more efficient. Our result uses a fixed microwave signal that is mixed with an optical-pump signal to generate a coherent frequency comb with a precisely determined carrier separation. The resonant enhancement enables us to work with microwave powers that are three orders of magnitude lower than those in commercially available devices. We emphasize the practical relevance of our results to high rates of data communication. To circumvent the limitations imposed by nonlinear effects in optical communication fibres, one has to solve two problems: to provide a compact and fully integrated, yet high-quality and coherent, frequency comb generator; and to calculate nonlinear signal propagation in real time5. We report a solution to the first problem.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1110-x Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:568:y:2019:i:7752:d:10.1038_s41586-019-1110-x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1110-x

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().