Multi-channel broadband optical chaos generation assisted by phase modulation and CFBG feedback

In this paper, we propose a novel and simple multi-channel broadband optical chaos generation scheme based on phase modulation and chirped fiber Bragg grating (CFBG). Firstly, phase modulation is introduced to generate more new frequency components to broaden the spectrum of the phase chaos. Meanwhile, the accumulated dispersion from CFBG distorts the intensity chaos, converts phase chaos to intensity chaos, and weakens the laser relaxation oscillation. This process would lead to energy redistribution in the power spectrum, effectively increasing the chaotic bandwidth. Then, the wavelength detuning between CFBG and the semiconductor laser is introduced to enhance the chaotic bandwidth further. The experiment results show that the 10 dB bandwidths of the five channels are up to 31.0 GHz, 34.3 GHz, 36.3 GHz, 40 GHz, and 40 GHz, respectively. Note that the maximum bandwidth of the PD in our experiment is limited to 40 GHz. In addition, the multi-channel chaotic signals obtained from the experiment system are used to generate multi-channel physical random numbers. After the post-processing operations, the total rate of five parallel high-speed physical random number generation channels is 4.64 Tbit/s (160 GSa/s × 5bit × 1 channel + 160 GSa/s × 6bit × 4 channels). As far as we know, this is the highest record of using external cavity feedback semiconductor lasers to generate random numbers, which has great potential to meet the security requirements of next-generation Tbit/s optical communication systems.