SFDR enhancement in analog photonic links by simultaneous compensation for dispersion and nonlinearity

A method to improve the spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR) of analog photonic links has been proposed and experimentally demonstrated, which only consists of a phase modulator (PM), a polarizer and an optical filter. Such structure could compensate for the chromatic dispersion and the nonlinearity of the modulator simultaneously. In addition, by adjusting the states of polarization (SOPs) launching into the PM and the polarizer, the proposed scheme could also be reconfigured to mitigate the second harmonic nonlinearity induced by the photodetector. Experimental results show that the suppressions of the second-order and third-order intermodulation distortions (IMD2 & IMD3) are larger than 14-dB and 25.4-dB, respectively. Furthermore, the SFDR can achieve ~110-dB · Hz(4/5) for 40-km fiber transmission, which is 26-dB higher than that of the link without compensation.