Widely tunable single bandpass microwave photonic filter based on Brillouin-assisted optical carrier recovery

A widely tunable single bandpass microwave photonic filter (MPF) based on Brillouin-assisted optical carrier recovery in a highly nonlinear fiber (HNLF) with only one optical filter is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. The fundamental principle lies in the fact that the suppressed optical carrier of the phase modulated optical signal could be recovered by the stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) amplification effect. When phase modulated optical signals go through an optical filter with a bandpass response, the optical carrier and the upper sidebands suffer from the suppression of the optical filter because they fall in the stopband of that. In our system, the optical carrier could be recovered by the SBS operation around 38 dB. The MPF is achieved by one-to-one mapping from the optical domain to the electrical domain only when one of phase modulated sidebands lies in the bandpass of the optical filter. It shows an excellent selectivity with a 3-dB bandwidth of 170 MHz over a tuning frequency range of 9.5-32.5 GHz. The out-of-band suppression of the MPF is more than 20 dB. Moreover, the MPF shows an excellent shape factor with 10-dB bandwidth of only 520 MHz. The frequency response of the MPF could be widely tuned by changing the frequency difference between the frequency of the optical carrier and the center frequency of the bandpass of the optical filter. A proof-of-concept experiment is carried out to verify the proposed approach.