Improvement of flatness of optical frequency comb based on nonlinear effect of intensity modulator

Optical frequency comb (OFC) generated using cascaded intensity and phase modulators was experimentally demonstrated. Very flat OFC can be achieved by cascading intensity and phase modulators driven directly by sinusoidal waveform, where chirped fiber Bragg grating or specially tailored radio frequency waveforms are not required. It is found that the spectral flatness of OFC is related to direct current (DC) bias of intensity modulator and the optimum ratio of DC bias to half-wave voltage is 0.35. In the experiment, 15 comb lines within 1 dB spectral power variation are obtained at 10 GHz microwave frequency. The experimental results agree well with the simulation.