Photonic millimeter-wave transfer with balanced dual-heterodyne phase noise detection and cancellation

We report on the realization of long-haul and high-precision millimeter-wave (mm-wave) transfer through a fiber-optic link based on balanced dual-heterodyne phase noise detection. The balanced dual-heterodyne detection is achieved by detecting the fiber phase noise superimposed two intermediate frequency (IF) signals without requiring a local synchronization signal and its output is used to compensate the fiber-induced phase noise by actuating the frequency of the one optical carrier. The proposed scheme can effectively get rid of the effect of the local reference, largely simplifying the configuration at the local site. Additionally, we model and experimentally study the noise contribution coming from the out-of-band, which can be effectively suppressed to the below of the system noise floor with a fractional frequency instability of 1.9 × 10^-17 at 10,000 s by designing and implementing a high-precision temperature control module with a peak-to-peak temperature fluctuation of no more than 0.002 K. We experimentally demonstrate that a 100 GHz mm-wave signal to be transmitted over a 150 km fiber-optic link can achieve the fractional frequency instabilities of less than 3.4 × 10^-14 at 1 s and 3.5 × 10^-17 at 10,000 s.