In-fiber reconfigurable generation of arbitrary (asymmetric) picosecond temporal intensity waveforms by time-domain optical pulse shaping

A fiber-optic programmable optical pulse shaper is experimentally demonstrated using multi-level phase-only linear filtering, capable of synthesizing arbitrary (including asymmetric) temporal intensity waveforms. The reconfigurable filtering operation is implemented in the time domain with a single electro-optic phase modulator (EO-PM) driven by a high-speed electronic arbitrary waveform generator (AWG). The required multi-level modulation signal is calculated from a combination of optimization algorithms, namely the Gerchberg-Saxton algorithm (GSA) and a genetic algorithm (GA). We report the synthesis of high-quality, arbitrary temporal intensity profiles, including asymmetric triangular waveforms and similar to 150 Gbaud random on-off keying (OOK) pulse and pulse amplitude-modulation (PAM) code sequences, with a temporal resolution of similar to 2 ps over a maximum time window of similar to 60 ps. (C) 2016 Optical Society of America