title: Balanced optical-microwave phase detectors for optoelectronic phase-locked loops.
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 fs in-loop relative timing jitter (integrated from 1 Hz to 10 MHz) between a 44 MHz optical pulse train and a 10.225 GHz microwave signal is demonstrated.
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA.
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Kim
authors.forename: F X
authors.initials: FX
authors.lastname: Kärtner
authors.forename: F
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Ludwig