Noise Floor Reduction of an Er:Fiber Laser-Based Photonic Microwave Generator

The generation of microwaves from optical signals suffers from thermal and shot noise inherent in the photodetection process. This problem is more acute at lower pulse repetition rates where photodiode saturation limits the achievable signal-to-noise ratio. In this paper, we demonstrate a 10-15-dB reduction in the 10-GHz phase noise floor by multiplication of the pulse repetition rate. Starting with a 250-MHz fundamentally mode-locked erbium (Er):fiber laser, we compare the following two different approaches to repetition rate multiplication: 1) Fabry-Perot cavity filtering and 2) a cascaded, unbalanced Mach-Zehnder (MZ) fiber-based interferometer. These techniques reduce the phase noise floor on the 10-GHz photodetected harmonic to -158 and -162 dBc/Hz, respectively, for Fourier frequencies higher than 100 kHz.