title: Optical sinc-shaped Nyquist pulses of exceptional quality.
abstract: Sinc-shaped Nyquist pulses possess a rectangular spectrum, enabling data to be encoded in a minimum spectral bandwidth and satisfying by essence the Nyquist criterion of zero inter-symbol interference (ISI). This property makes them very attractive for communication systems since data transmission rates can be maximized while the bandwidth usage is minimized. However, most of the pulse-shaping methods reported so far have remained rather complex and none has led to ideal sinc pulses. Here a method to produce sinc-shaped Nyquist pulses of very high quality is proposed based on the direct synthesis of a rectangular-shaped and phase-locked frequency comb. The method is highly flexible and can be easily integrated in communication systems, potentially offering a substantial increase in data transmission rates. Further, the high quality and wide tunability of the reported sinc-shaped pulses can also bring benefits to many other fields, such as microwave photonics, light storage and all-optical sampling.
authors.affiliation: EPFL Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Group for Fibre Optics, SCI-STI-LT, Station 11, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Marcelo A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Soto
authors.forename: Mehdi
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Alem
authors.forename: Mohammad
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Amin Shoaie
authors.forename: Armand
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Vedadi
authors.forename: Camille-Sophie
authors.initials: CS
authors.lastname: Brès
authors.forename: Luc
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Thévenaz
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Schneider
mesh_terms: D005336:Fiber Optic Technology; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D055095:Optics and Photonics; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted