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Optically locked low-noise photonic microwave oscillator
Zexing Zhao1, Bin Li1, Kunpeng Jia1
1National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures, School of Electronic Science and Engineering, College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, School of Physics, Research Institute of Superconductor Electronics (RISE) & Key Laboratory of Optoelectronic Devices and Systems with Extreme Performances of MOE, Key Laboratory of Intelligent Optical Sensing and Manipulation, Ministry of Education, and Collaborative Innovation Center of Advanced Microstructures, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, China.
Abstract:
The next generation of sensing and communication applications rely on high-frequency microwave generation with low noise. Microwave photonic technology is highly promising; however, its practical applications have so far been limited by the complexity of existing system architectures. Here, we demonstrate an optically locked low-noise photonic microwave oscillator, in which all the optical components are packaged within a small module of 166 mL; low noise microwave generation is achieved at 10.4 GHz with single-sideband phase noise of -54 dBc/Hz at 10 Hz, -141 dBc/Hz at 10 kHz, and -162 dBc/Hz at 10 MHz offset. The above performance arises from a dual-laser self-injection-locking scheme to a single Fabry-Pérot cavity with high Q exceeding 108, with >20 dB common-mode noise suppression. The low-noise nature of this reference is coherently transferred to the X-band through a high-performance thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) electro-optic comb chip, thereby overcoming long-standing barriers in photonic microwave integration to enable truly field-deployable low-noise microwave generation.
