Full characterization of self-phase-modulation based low-noise, cavity-less pulse source for photonic-assisted...

A high quality cavity-less pulse source, realized as a combination of linear pulse compression and self-phase-modulation (SPM) based regeneration is demonstrated and strictly characterized for the first time. The regenerated pulses, with 3.6 GHz repetition rate, are optimized through rigorous relative intensity-noise (RIN) measurement. Temporal intensity and chirp characterizations demonstrate that the pulses exhibit characteristic of low RIN, and are chirp- and pedestal-free. The cavity-less pulse source is further tested in a photonic-assisted analog-to-digital (ADC) configuration as the sampling source. A record result of more than 8 effective quantization bits at 202 MHz is demonstrated.