High-frequency characterization of an optical phase modulator with phase modulation-to-intensity modulation conversion in dispersive fibers

We propose a new method for characterizing optical phase modulators based on phase modulation-to-intensity modulation (PM-to-IM) conversion in dispersive fibers.The fiber dispersion spectrally alters the relative phasing of the phase-modulated signal and leads to the PM-to-IM conversion,which is extended to measure the modulation efficiency of optical phase modulators.In the demonstration,the frequency-dependent modulation index and half-wave voltage are experimentally measured for a commercial phase modulator.Compared with conventional methods,the proposed method works without the restriction of small-signal operations,and allows swept-frequency measurement with high resolution and accuracy by using a vector network analyzer.