Tunable all-optical single-bandpass photonic microwave filter based on spectrally sliced broad optical source and...

A tunable all-optical single-bandpass photonic microwave filter (PMF) based on spectrally sliced broadband optical source and phase modulation is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. A broadband optical source and a Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) are used to generate continuous optical spectral samples, which are employed to form a finite impulse response filter with a single-bandpass response with the help of a single-mode fiber. A phase modulator is then adopted to eliminate the baseband components in the filtering response. The center frequency of the PMF can be tuned by changing the free spectral range of the MZI. An experiment is performed, and the results demonstrate that the proposed PMF has a single-bandpass without baseband components and a tuning range of 5-15 GHz.