Simple-structured, subfemtosecond-resolution optical-microwave phase detector.

We present a fiber-based optical-microwave phase detector that detects the phase error between optical pulse trains and microwave signals with sub-fs resolution over 1 MHz bandwidth. The proposed phase detector is used to synchronize microwave signals from VCO with optical pulse trains from mode-locked Er-fiber lasers. The residual phase noise between the optical pulse trains and the synchronized microwave signals is −133 dBc/Hz (−154 dBc/Hz) at 1 Hz (5 kHz) offset frequency, which results in 838 as integrated rms timing jitter [1 Hz–1 MHz]. The long-term residual phase drift is 847 as (rms) measured over 2 hours. We also used the phase detector and the low-jitter Er-fiber laser to measure the phase noise of a microwave signal synthesizer.

We review our most recent progress in microwave photonic applications of ultralow timing jitter femtosecond mode-locked fiber lasers. Sub-femtosecond timing jitter (integrated from 10 kHz to >10 MHz offset frequency) optical pulse trains can be generated from various types of mode-locked fiber lasers using dispersion engineering and intracavity filtering. To fully utilize such ultralow-jitter lasers for microwave photonic applications, we demonstrate a sub-femtosecond-resolution (−159 dBc/Hz phase noise floor) phase detection method between optical pulse trains and microwave signals using a Sagnac-fiber-loop-based device named the fiber-loop optical-microwave phase detector (FLOM-PD). Using ultralow-jitter mode-locked Er-fiber lasers and FLOM-PDs, we generate 10-GHz microwave signals with −142 dBc/Hz absolute single-sideband phase noise at 10-kHz offset frequency. When an all-fiber Michelson interferometer-based repetition-rate stabilization method is further employed, the phase noise is suppressed to −90 dBc/Hz at 10-Hz offset frequency, which results in 3-fs absolute rms timing jitter integrated from 10 Hz to 10 MHz offset frequency. Long-distance microwave phase transfer via optical fiber links is also demonstrated using the FLOM-PD as a means for stabilizing pulse time-of-flight in fiber transfer. Relative frequency instability of 6.5 × 10−19 is demonstrated for 2.856-GHz microwave signals transferred over a 2.3-km-long fiber link. We anticipate that the capability of generation, characterization, stabilization, and transfer of ultralow-noise microwave signals using ultralow-jitter femtosecond mode-locked lasers will find more applications in microwave photonics in the near future.

Conversion of analog signals into digital signals is one of the most important functionalities in modern signal processing systems. As the signal frequency increases beyond 10 GHz, the timing jitter from electronic clocks, currently limited at approximately 100 fs, compromises the achievable resolution of analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). Owing to their ultralow timing jitter, the use of optical pulse trains from passively mode-locked lasers has been considered to be a promising way for sampling electronic signals. In this paper, based on sub-10 fs jitter optical sampling pulse trains, we demonstrate a photonic subsampling ADC that downconverts and digitizes a narrowband microwave signal at 40 GHz carrier frequency with higher than 7 effective-number-of-bit (ENOB) resolution.

Ultrafast Tm-doped fiber laser based on hybrid fiber coupler

To obtain low-phase-noise microwave signals with a widely tunable frequency range, an optoelectronic oscillator (OEO) was constructed on the basis of an optically injected semiconductor laser (OISL) for the generation of high-quality microwave signals. Our OEO relied on the effect of wavelength-selective amplification and the period-one (P1) oscillation under optical injection. The signal’s frequency stability, side-mode-suppression ratio (SMSR) and linewidth were optimized by the subharmonic microwave modulation technique in the OEO loop. The experimental results showed that the frequency of the signal obtained by the proposed OEO could be tuned up to 18 GHz. Using the dual-loop OEO structure, the SMSR was increased to 55 dB. Moreover, the phase noise of the obtained microwave signal was lower than −81 dBc/Hz at 1 kHz frequency offset and −119 dBc/Hz at 10 kHz frequency offset. This was achieved by introducing subharmonic microwave modulation in the OEO loop, respectively. Furthermore, via the utilization of a Fabry–Perot laser diode (FP-LD) in the proposed structure, a dual-loop OEO with different dual-frequency configurations (which could be tuned up to 12 and 18 GHz) was obtained.

A 1.5-3.3 GHz, 7 mW, all-digital delay-locked loop (ADDLL) designed in a UMC 130-nm CMOS technology is presented in this paper. The proposed ADDLL uses the modified successive approximation register to control a NAND-based coarse delay line, which enables wider operating frequency range and small intrinsic delay. The inverter-based fine delay line is controlled by an XOR-based up/down counter with dead-zone free phase detector to overcome the dead-zone problem of conventional phase detectors. The D-type flip-flops in the phase detector are modified to detect sub-ps level delay difference between the input and output clocks, so that a delay resolution of better than 1 ps is achieved in the proposed design. The combination of both coarse and fine locking processes gives outstanding performance in terms of residual phase difference and output jitter. The overall design occupies 0.0077 mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> area. The experimental results show that the peak-to-peak and root mean square jitters are 12 and 1.629 ps at 3.3 GHz, respectively, while the input jitter is 2.6 ps peak-to-peak and 612 fs rms.

We propose a polarity decision carrier recovery algorithm that is useful for carrier acquisition in high order-QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation). The PD (phase detector) output and its variance characteristics are mathematically derived and the simulation results are presented. We design a carrier recovery loop with this polarity decision PD and ATC (automatic transfer-mode controller), which is proposed to detect a proper time for mode change and to yield fine phase tracking error in the steady state. While the conventional DD (decision directed) algorithm can only acquire frequency offsets of less than /spl plusmn/10 kHz, the proposed carrier recovery algorithm can acquire up to /spl plusmn/200 kHz without AFC (automatic frequency control). We show the RMS (root mean square) phase error performance using the proposed carrier recovery PLL (phase locked loop).

Modeling sea ice microwave emissivities at large scales presents challenges, due to complex interactions between the microwave signal and the sea ice environment. For the preparation of the Copernicus Imaging Microwave Radiometer mission (CIMR) that focusses on the monitoring of polar regions, a pragmatic parameterization of the sea ice emissivity over the Arctic in winter is proposed, providing consistent emissivity parameterizations between 1.4 and 36 GHz, for both orthogonal polarizations. Satellite‐derived microwave emissivities are calculated from the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2, Soil Moisture Active Passive, and Soil Moisture Ocean Salinity observations, subtracting the atmospheric contributions and the surface temperature modulation using ERA5 meteorological reanalysis. The resulting Arctic sea ice emissivities are analyzed, alongside sea ice geophysical parameters from neXtSIM model outputs and ERA5, to identify the variables for the emissivity parameterization. Sea Ice Thickness emerges as a crucial factor, particularly at 18 and 36 GHz. A training database of coincident satellite‐derived emissivities and geophysical parameters is set up, to develop a Neural Network parameterization of the emissivities based on the geophysical parameters. This pragmatic methodology establishes a direct link between calculated emissivities and physical sea ice properties, eliminating the need for a priori assumptions. Promising emissivity results are obtained, with Root Mean Square Error below 0.03 for most channels, and reaching 0.04 at 36 GHz. Part of the error is expected to come from uncertainties in the input geophysical parameters. The emissivity frequency dependence is checked, and the emissivity angular variation of the 1.4 GHz is calculated from SMOS‐derived emissivities.

In this work a study about the use of four mathematical-computational nontraditional tools with detection purpose and automatic classification of assembly and manufacturing defects in automotive gearboxes from vibration signals is presented. Due to the State of the gear meshing to be characterized by amplitude and phase modulations, two demodulation techiniques are considered. The demodulation of the amplitude and phase of the gear meshing signals using least squares and decomposition by Generalized S Transform, in the wich are used Windows that are adjusted to the characteristics of signafs modulation. The other two approaches, take into account the amplitude of the gear meshing frequencies and their lateral bands. In one, statistical tools, as kurtosis, crest factor and root mean square levei are adopted, applied to the time parcels associated to the frequencies of interest of Choi-Williams Transforms of the signals, and in another one is calculated the sum of the global Bispectrum magnitudes and also the sum of bispectrum related to the gear meshing frequency only. The proposed methodologies were applied to the simulated gear meshing vibration data, where a peliminary study is made for to evaluate the viability of each one. The chosen methodologies - Amplitude and phase demodulation and the one that uses Choi-Williams Transform were submitted to sensitivity analysis with simulated gear meshing signals in order to evaluate their capabilities how much to the modulation degree present in the signals, under several conditions of noise. Finaly, these two approaches were applied to the real vibration signals obtained of an automotive transmission.

Bias drift can always be a difficult problem in the application of electro-optical (EO) sensors based on intensity demodulation method, which may lead to the output jitter and distortion of the waveform. The bias drift problem can be avoided using a two-wavelength phase demodulation scheme, and however, the system noise restricts its use to low amplitude measurements. In this article, the existing two-wavelength phase demodulation method is improved to overcome the limitation of low amplitude measurement for pulsed signals. The improved method can effectively avoid the bias drift problem compared with the intensity demodulation method and reduce the measurement limit by more than one order of magnitude compared with the phase demodulation method simultaneously. Based on the asymmetric two-wavelength EO modulation structure, we obtain the transfer function and its explicit demodulation formula without the bias term. In particular, by adjusting the bias difference of the two lasers in the EO sensor to <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\pi $ </tex-math></inline-formula>/2, the modulated signal is simply proportional to the root mean square (rms) of the two-channel outputs. To support and illustrate our method, a simulation and a verification experiment are carried out and show that the demodulated signals have good consistency with each other.

For expanding the amplitude-frequency response range of the differential cross-phase multiply (DCM) algorithm in the φ-OTDR system, a temporal spline interpolation (TSI) method is proposed to pre-process Rayleigh backscattering (RBS) signals. Through the TSI method, the discrete temporal signals characterizing RBS traces are subjected to interpolation, facilitating a reduction in differential approximation errors. This, in turn, establishes a heightened level of precision in phase demodulation, especially relevant across extensive sensing distances. By comparing the recovered time-domain waveforms and the corresponding power spectral densities without and with the TSI, the above improvement effect has been experimentally validated by utilizing the TSI. The results show that, with the TSI, the amplitude-frequency response range of the DCM algorithm is enlarged by 2.78 times, and the new relationship among fpulse, f, and D under the root mean square error (RMSE) tolerance less than 0.1 can be expressed as 1.9(D+1)f ≤ fpulse. This contribution underscores a substantial advancement in the capabilities of the DCM algorithm, holding promise for refined performance in optical fiber sensing applications.

Experimental investigation on the propagation characteristics of pressure oscillation in direct contact condensation with low mass flux steam jet

We propose a new cesium (Cs) atomic clock whose microwave source is a 9.1926-GHz harmonically and regeneratively mode-locked erbium fiber laser rather than a quartz oscillator and a multiplexer. The repetition rate of the laser is directly locked to the Cs resonance, and the frequency stability evaluated by the Allan variance is 7.1 x 10(-12) for tau = 1 s. This new atomic clock provides not only a precise 1-s time standard after demultiplexing but also an optical pulse train with the same stability, which means that the ultrastable clock signal can be delivered throughout the world by means of optical fiber networks.

Abstract. The Temporal Experiment for Storms and Tropical Systems Demonstration (TEMPEST-D) demonstrated the capability of CubeSat satellites to provide high-quality, stable microwave signals for estimating water vapor, clouds, and precipitation from space. Unlike the operational NOAA and MetOp series satellites, which combine microwave and hyperspectral infrared sensors on the same platforms to optimize retrievals, CubeSat radiometers such as TEMPEST do not carry additional sensors. In such cases, the high-temporal- and spatial-resolution and multi-channel measurements from the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) on the next-generation series of Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES-R) are ideal for assisting these smaller, stand-alone radiometers. Based on sensitivity tests, the water vapor retrievals from TEMPEST are improved by adding water-vapor-sounding, window, and CO2 channels at 6.2, 6.9, 7.3, 8.4, 10.3, 11.2, 12.3, and 13.3 µm from ABI, which help to increase the vertical resolution of soundings and reduce retrieval errors. Adding three ABI water-vapor-sounding channels, under clear-sky conditions, retrieval biases and root mean square errors improve by approximately 10 %, while under cloudy skies, biases remain unchanged, but root mean square errors still decrease by 5 %; meanwhile, retrieval biases and root mean square errors are substantially reduced by adding more information from eight ABI bands in both clear and cloudy skies. Humidity soundings are also validated using coastal radiosonde data from the Integrated Global Radiosonde Archive (IGRA) from 2019 to 2020. When ABI indicates clear skies, water vapor retrievals improve somewhat by decreasing the overall bias in the microwave-only estimate by roughly 10 %, although layer root mean square errors remain roughly unchanged at 1 g kg−1 when three or eight ABI channels are added. When ABI indicates cloudy conditions, there is little change in the results. The small number of matched radiosondes may limit the observed improvement.

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a photonic sampling-enabled multi-band microwave signals generation scheme. The intermediate-frequency input signal is up-converted to high frequency output signals in multiple frequency bands, after being optically sampled by an ultra-short optical pulse train and subsequently being detected by a photodetector (PD). The ultra-short pulse source, realized by using an electro-optic modulation-based time lens with the chirp compensation, can be flexibly adjusted to enhance the performance of multi-band frequency up-conversion. In the experiment, after optimizing the optical ultra-short pulse source with a repetition frequency of 8 GHz, ten phase-coded up-converted microwave signals with a 13-bit Barker code were successfully generated within a frequency range from 7 GHz to 41 GHz. The power fluctuation among the generated microwave signals in multi-band is measured to be 5.9 dB. The experiment results indicate that, our proposed scheme can realize the multi-band up-conversion with a high fidelity.