An Electrooptic Feedforward System for Dynamic Control of a Quasi-Continuous-Wave Chirped Laser Source

In this letter, a feedforward system is developed for control of a quasi-continuous-wave (CW) chirped source. The goal of this study is to improve the uniformity of the temporal profile of a quasi-CW chirped laser source. The chirped spectrum input to the system is dynamically flattened using a feedforward scheme having bandwidth in excess of 1 GHz, resulting in more than three times reduction on the contrast of the input spectrum. A uniform chirped spectrum laser source can be used in time-stretched photonic analog-to-digital conversion, as part of laser radar system, or for optical coherence tomography.