Photonic-Assisted Tunable Microwave Pulse Fractional Hilbert Transformer Based on a Temporal Pulse Shaping System

A photonic-assisted fractional Hilbert transformer with tunable fractional order implemented based on temporal pulse shaping (TPS) is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. The proposed fractional Hilbert transformer consists of a phase modulator and two dispersive elements with complementary dispersion. The fractional Hilbert transform (FHT) is realized if a step function is applied to the phase modulator to introduce a phase jump. The proposed technique is investigated numerically and experimentally. The results show that a real-time FHT is achieved with a tunable fractional order by tuning the step function applied to the phase modulator.