Abstract

A balanced optical–microwave phase detector for the extraction of low-jitter, high-power, and drift-free microwave signals from optical pulse trains is presented. The phase detection is based on electro-optic sampling with a differentially biased Sagnac loop. Because the timing information is transferred in the optical domain, the regenerated microwave signal is robust against drifts and photodetector nonlinearities. In a first experimental implementation, $3\mathrm{fs}$ in-loop relative timing jitter (integrated from $1\mathrm{Hz}\text{to}10\mathrm{MHz}$) between a $44\mathrm{MHz}$ optical pulse train and a $10.225\mathrm{GHz}$ microwave signal is demonstrated.

© 2006 Optical Society of America

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