Microwave photonic frequency down-conversion link based on intensity and phase paralleled modulation

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Abstract
A photonic microwave down-conversion approach is proposed and experimentally demonstrated based on a Mach-Zehnder modulator paralleled with a phase modulator. The incident radio frequency signal and the local oscillator signal are feed to the MZM and PM, respectively, and these two modulated optical signals interfere in the coupler. The useless higher-order sidebands are removed by a tunable optical band-pass filter. The principle of microwave frequency down-conversion is analyzed theoretically, the MZM and PM paralleled frequency down-conversion system is built. Then the performance of system is tested, and the experimental results show that the spurious-free dynamic range achieves 104.8 dB:Hz2/3. Compared to the conventional MZM-MZM cascaded system, the SFDR has been improved by 16 dB. The MZM and PM paralleled frequency down-conversion system can balance the intensity of the two coherent beams easily, and only single DC bias is needed. The proposed method possesses simple structure and high dynamic range.

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