RF frequency sextupling via an optical two-tone signal generated from two modulation lightwaves from one Mach-Zehnder...

An optical two-tone (OTT) signal is generated with a wide frequency separation, based on the suppression of ± 1st-order optical sidebands without using optical band-rejection filtering. By combining two orthogonally polarized lightwaves modulated with different modulation indices, each optical sideband constituting the combined lightwave has a different polarization. Some of these optical sidebands can be suppressed using a polarizer. By using a single Mach-Zehnder optical modulator to achieve two optical modulations, an OTT signal with a 60-GHz frequency-separation was successfully generated with 32-dB suppression of undesired ± 1st-order optical sidebands. An rf signal was also obtained from the OTT signal.