Generation of coherent optical multi-carriers using concatenated,dual-drive Mach-Zehnder and phase modulators

The generation of coherent optical subcarriers based on a concatenated dual-drive Mach-Zehnder intensity modulator（IM） and two phase modulators（PMs） is proposed and experimentally demonstrated.The modulation index and DC bias of PM+IM modulation are theoretically investigated.Theoretical analysis and numerical study are also carried out to examine the proposed scheme.We use 25-GHz RF synchronous sinusoidal signals to drive cascaded two-stage PMs and IM,through which we generate 28 subcarriers with peak power fluctuations less than 4 dB.The measured tone-to-noise ratio of the subcarrier is higher than 40 dB.The experimental results show that for 100-Gb/s polarization multiplexing QPSK signal,the receiver sensitivity of the back-to-back signal is -28.6 dBm,and the power penalty is lower than 1 dB after 100-km transmission at the BER of 1×10;.