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This article presents an experimental demonstration of a high-capacity millimeter-wave 5G NR signal transmission with analog radio-over-fiber (ARoF) fronthaul over multi-core fiber and full real-time processing. The demonstration validates the core of the blueSPACE fronthaul architecture which combines ARoF fronthaul with space division multiplexing in the optical distribution network to alleviate the fronthaul capacity bottleneck and maintain a centralized radio access network with fully centralized signal processing. The introduction of optical beamforming in the blueSPACE architecture brings true multi-beam transmission and enables full spatial control over the RF signal. The proposed ARoF architecture features a transmitter that generates the ARoF signal and an optical signal carrying a reference local oscillator employed for downconversion at the remote unit from a single RF reference at the central office. A space division multiplexing based radio access network with multi-core fibre allows parallel transport of the uplink ARoF signal and reference local oscillator at the same wavelength over separate cores. A complete description of the real-time signal processing and experimental setup is provided and system performance is evaluated. Transmission of an 800 MHz wide extended 5G NR fronthaul signal over a 7-core fibre is shown with full real-time signal processing, achieving 1.4 Gbit/s with a bit error rate $$ < 3.8 × 10 - 3 and thus below the limit for hard-decision forward error correction with 7% overhead.

International audience; Tiled-aperture Coherent Beam Combination architecture opens the way to digital laser operating in high peak and average power regimes.

Atmospheric turbulences can generate scintillation or beam wandering phenomena that impairs free space optical (FSO) communication. In this paper, we propose and demonstrate a proof-of-concept FSO communication receiver based on a spatial demultiplexer and a photonic integrated circuit coherent combiner. The system collects the light from several Hermite Gauss spatial modes and coherently combine on chip the energy from the different modes into a single output. The FSO receiver is characterized with a wavefront emulator bench that generates arbitrary phase and intensity patterns. The multimode receiver presents a strong resilience to wavefront distortions, compared to a monomode FSO receiver. The system is then used to detect a modulation of the optical beam through a random wavefront profile., Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures

This paper presents an experimental demonstration of analog radio-over-fiber (ARoF) fronthaul for high-bandwidth, high-capacity millimeter wave (mm-wave) extended fifth generation mobile network (5G) new radio (NR) signals over an optical distribution network with optical space division multiplexing (SDM). ARoF is shown to alleviate fronthaul capacity bottlenecks, transporting an 800 MHz wide extended 5G NR signal and allowing to maintain full centralization in a centralized radio access network (C-RAN). The proposed ARoF fronthaul architecture features a transmitter that generates the ARoF signal and an optical signal carrying a reference local oscillator (LO) employed for downconversion at the remote unit (RU) from a single radio frequency (RF) reference at the central office (CO). An SDM based RAN with 7-core multi-core fiber (MCF) allows parallel transport of the uplink ARoF signal and reference LO at the same wavelength over separate cores. Transmission of an 800 MHz wide extended 5G NR fronthaul signal over 7-core MCF is shown with full real-time processing, achieving 1.4 Gbit/s with BER

International audience; We report on the coherent beam combining of 61 femtosecond fiber chirped-pulse amplifiers in a tiled-aperture configuration along with an interferometric phase measurement technique. Relying on coherent beam recombination in the far field, this technique appears suitable for the combination of a large number of fiber amplifiers. The 61 output beams are stacked in a hexagonal arrangement and collimated through a high fill factor hexagonal micro-lens array. The residual phase error between two fibers is as low as λ/90 RMS, while a combining efficiency of ∼50% is achieved.

International audience; We report on the first coherent beam combining of 60 fiber chirped-pulse amplifiers in a tiled-aperture configuration along with an interferometric phase measurement technique. Relying on coherent beams recombination in the far field, this technique appears well suited for the combination of a large number of fiber amplifiers. The 60 output beams are stacked in a hexagonal arrangement and collimated through a high fill factor hexagonal microlens array. The measured residual errors within the fiber array yields standard deviations of 4.2 μm for the fiber pitch and 3.1 mrad for the beam-to-beam pointing, allowing a combining efficiency of 50 %. The phasing of 60 fiber amplifiers demonstrates both pulse synchronization and phase stabilization with a residual phase error as low as lambda/100 RMS.

The introduction of millimeter wave (mm-wave) frequency bands for cellular communications with significantly larger bandwidths compared to their sub-6 GHz counterparts, the resulting densification of network deployments and the introduction of antenna arrays with beamforming result in major increases in fronthaul capacity required for 5G networks. As a result, a radical re-design of the radio access network is required since traditional fronthaul technologies are not scaleable. In this article the use of analog radio-over-fiber (ARoF) is proposed and demonstrated as a viable alternative which, combined with space division multiplexing in the optical distribution network as well as photonic integration of the required transceivers, shows a path to a scaleable fronthaul solution for 5G. The trade-off between digitized and analog fronthaul is discussed and the ARoF architecture proposed by blueSPACE is introduced. Two options for the generation of ARoF two-tone signals for mm-wave generation via optical heterodyning are discussed in detail, including designs for the implementation in photonic integrated circuits as well as measurements of their phase noise performance. The proposed photonic integrated circuit designs include the use of both InP and SiN platforms for ARoF signal generation and optical beamforming respectively, proposing a joint design that allows for true multi-beam transmission from a single antenna array. Phase noise measurements based on laboratory implementations of ARoF generation based on a Mach–Zehnder modulator with suppressed carrier and with an optical phase-locked loop are presented and the suitability of these transmitters is evaluated though phase noise simulations. Finally, the viability of the proposed ARoF fronthaul architecture for the transport of high-bandwidth mm-wave 5G signals is proven with the successful implementation of a real-time transmission link based on an ARoF baseband unit with full real-time processing of extended 5G new radio signals with 800 MHz bandwidth, achieving transmission over 10 km of 7-core single-mode multi-core fiber and 9 m mm-wave wireless at 25.5 GHz with bit error rates below the limit for a 7% overhead hard decision forward error correction.

We present the demonstration of an integrated frequency modulated continuous wave LiDAR on a silicon platform. The waveform calibration, the scanning system, and the balanced detectors are implemented on a chip. Detection and ranging of a moving hard target at upto 60 m with less than 5 mW of output power is demonstrated in this paper.

Inertia-less optical scanners are an essential building block for many systems, including remote sensing, spectroscopy, and optronics. Although many solutions provide efficient scanning devices in the visible to near-infrared spectral range today, none of these devices offers good performances in longer wavelengths like in the mid-IR range. The new rationale that is described in this paper is to take advantage of existing and well-proven steering techniques in the near IR and to reach mid-IR by frequency conversion in a specifically designed Fourier transform optical parametric oscillator.

International audience; We report on the coherent beam combining of seven fiber chirped-pulse amplifiers using a highly scalable architecture. A combining efficiency of 48% is obtained in linear regime, yielding 71 W pump-limited average power after compression, with a phase noise between two fibers as low as λ/38 RMS. The experiment is operated at high B-integral, with only little impact on the combining efficiency as well as on the temporal and spatial properties of the combined beam.

International audience; We report on the use of a 61 beamlets Coherent Beam Combination femtosecond fiber amplifiers as a digital laser source to generate high power Orbital Angular Momentum beams. Such approach opens the path for higher order non-symmetrical user-defined far field distributions.

International audience; For the last decade, Coherent Beam Combining (CBC) has proven to be a successful method for increasing the output peak and average powers of femtosecond fiber amplifiers [1]. Within the framework of the XCAN project, we aim at the demonstration of the scalability of such laser systems by coherently combining 61 fiber amplifiers. Therefore, we use a highly scalable approach relying on a tiled-aperture geometry along with an interferometric phase measurement and control which can theoretically handle the coherent combination of up to 10 000 beams [2]. After very promising results obtained with 19 passive fibers [3], we present the first results obtained using seven active fibers. Figure 1: (a) Experimentally obtained far field. (b) Combined beam with corresponding M²-values. (c) Measured temporal profile of the combined beam. (d) Corresponding spectrum. The seven beams are arranged in a hexagonal array in the near field, collimated by a microlens array, and the combined beam is found in the far field. Based on a characterization of our experimental fiber array, the maximum efficiency is calculated to be η = 0.56. By filtering the central lobe, we obtain an experimental efficiency of η = 0.48 (fig. 1a,1b), which corresponds to 86 % of the theoretical value stated above. The measured M² of 1.15 on each axis proves a good quality of the combined beam. Finally, the beam is temporally compressed to 244 fs with a time-bandwidth product of 0.55, close to the simulated Fourier transform limit of 0.48 (fig. 1c,1d). The average power of the output beam is measured to be 71 W, corresponding to a compression efficiency of 0.86. The next steps will include the reduction of the pulse repetition rate and the resulting increase in peak power. Finally, the number of beams will be increased to 61 and the spatial and spectral characteristics of the combined beam will be studied.

A two dimensional photonic crystal (PhC) resonator, based on a recent design concept, entirely embedded in Silica, is fabricated in a CMOS full-process multiproject wafer, including additional steps such as implantation, metalization, Germanium deposition and planarization. A large loaded Q-factor (5.9 × 105) is achieved without removal of the silica cladding. A statistical analysis over 56 devices leads to an average value for the loaded Q of 4 × 105, in close agreement with calculations. An upper boundary for the fabrication disorder is estimated to 1.2 nm.

International audience; We report on the coherent combination of seven fiber amplifiers in the femtosec-ond regime using an interferometric phase measurement technique. A combination efficiencyof 54 % and a compressed pulse length of 225 fs were achieved.

Data centers are continuously growing in scale and can contain more than one million servers spreading across thousands of racks, requiring a large-scale switching network to provide broadband and reconfigurable interconnections of low latency. Traditional data center network architectures, through the use of electrical packet switches in a multi-tier topology, has fundamental weaknesses such as oversubscription and cabling complexity. Wireless intra-data center interconnection solutions have been proposed to deal with the cabling problem and can simultaneously address the over-provisioning problem by offering efficient topology re-configurability. In this work we introduce a novel free space optical interconnect solution for intra-data center networks that utilizes 2D optical beam steering for the transmitter, and high bandwidth wide-area photodiode arrays for the receiver. This new breed of free space optical interconnects can be developed on a photonic integrated circuit, offering ns switching at sub-&mu, W consumption. The proposed interconnects together with a networking architecture that is suitable for utilizing those devices could support next generation intra-data center networks, fulfilling the requirements of seamless operation, high connectivity, and agility in terms of the reconfiguration time.

An architecture for active coherent fiber laser beam combining using an interferometric measurement is demonstrated. This technique allows measuring the exact phase errors of each fiber beam in a single shot. Therefore, this method is a promising candidate toward very large number of combined fibers. Our experimental system, composed of 16 independent fiber channels, is used to evaluate the achieved phase locking stability in terms of phase shift error and bandwidth. We show that only 8 pixels per fiber on the camera is required for a stable close loop operation with a residual phase error of λ/20 rms, which demonstrates the scalability of this concept. Furthermore we propose a beam shaping technique to increase the combining efficiency.

Les proprietes intrinseques des fibres amplificatrices en font des candidates ideales pour le developpement de sources lasers de haute puissance. Ces sources trouvent de nombreuses applications dans des domaines aussi varies que l’industrie, la defense et la physique des particules. Dans ce dernier cas, des sources ultra-breves et ultra-intenses permettent d’envisager l’acceleration de protons pour la proton-therapie ou encore le remplacement des synchrotrons actuels par des architectures ayant un rendement plus important et une meilleure compacite. Cependant, du fait du confinement de la lumiere au coeur de la fibre, la puissance crete obtenue a partir d’une seule fibre amplificatrice reste limitee. La combinaison coherente de plusieurs fibres amplificatrices en parallele permet de s’affranchir de cette limitation.

Coherent beam combining in the femtosecond regime of a record number of 19 fibers is demonstrated. The interferometric phase measurement technique, particularly well suited to phase-lock a very large number of fibers, is successfully demonstrated in the femtosecond regime. A servo loop is implemented to control piezoelectric fiber stretchers for both phase and delay variation compensation. The residual phase errors are below λ/60 rms. Nearly 50% of the total energy is contained in the far-field central lobe. After compression, we obtain a combined pulse width of 300 fs identical to the master oscillator pulse width.

International audience; We report the first coherent combination of seven fiber amplifiers in thefemtosecond regime using an interferometric phase measurement. Details of the setup will bepresented, as well as first results evaluating the combination efficiency.

An architecture for large bandwidth active coherent fiber beam combining using interferometric measurement is demonstrated. The phases of all the fibers are extracted from a single image recorded on a high speed camera. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that the kHz regime is achieved with this technique. Our system, composed of 16 independent fiber channels, is used to evaluate the phase locking stability achieved with this technique. We also show that a minimum of 8 pixels per fiber on the camera is required for a stable close loop operation with a residual phase error of λ/20 rms, which demonstrates the scalability of this concept.

The XCAN project, which is a three years project and began in 2015, carried out by Thales and the Ecole Polytechnique aims at developing a laser system based on the coherent combination of laser beams produced through a network of amplifying optical fibers. This technique provides an attractive mean of reaching simultaneously the high peak and high average powers required for various industrial, scientific and defense applications. The architecture has to be compatible with very large number of fibers (1000-10000). The goal of XCAN is to overcome all the key scientific and technological barriers to the design and development of an experimental laser demonstrator. The coherent addition of multiple individual phased beams is aimed to provide tens of Gigawatt peak power at 50 kHz repetition rate. Coherent beam combining (CBC) of fiber amplifiers involves a master oscillator which is split into N fiber channels and then amplified through series of polarization maintaining fiber pre-amplifiers and amplifiers. In the so-called tiled aperture configuration, the N fibers are arranged in an array and collimated in the near field of the laser output. The N beamlets then interfere constructively in the far field, and give a bright central lobe. CBC techniques with active phase locking involve phase mismatch detection, calculation of the correction and phase compensation of each amplifier by means of phase modulators. Interferometric phase measurement has proven to be particularly well suited to phase-lock a very large number of fibers in continuous regime. A small fraction of the N beamlets is imaged onto a camera. The beamlets interfere separately with a reference beam. The phase mismatch of each beam is then calculated from the interferences’ position. In this presentation, we demonstrate the phase locking of 19 fibers in femtosecond pulse regime with this technique. In our first experiment, a master oscillator generates pulses of 300 fs (chirped at 200 ps). The beam is split into 19 passive channels. Prior to phase locking, the optical path differences are adjusted down to 10 μm with optical delay lines. Interferograms of the 19 fibers are recorded at 1 kHz with a camera. A dedicated algorithm is developed to measure both the phase and the delay between the fibers on a measurement path. The delay and phase shift are thus calculated collectively from a single image and piezo-electric fiber stretchers are controlled in order to ensure compensation of time-varying phase and delay variations. The residual phase shift error is below λ/60 rms. The coherent beam combining is obtained after propagation and compression. The combined pulse width is measured at 315fs. A second experiment was done to coherently combine two amplified channels of the XCAN demonstrator. A residual phase shift error of λ/30 rms was measured in this case.

We present a fully CMOS compatible frequency shifter device, in a I&Q dual Mach-Zehnder architecture. Frequency shift up to 410 MHz are obtained, with carrier and image sideband extinction from 27 to 51 dB.

International audience; We experimentally demonstrate the operating principles of a silicon-on-insulator interferometer for channel equalization purposes. The radio frequency filter is reconfigurable thanks to thermally controlled photonic crystal coupler and delay line.

Coherent beam combining of a record number of 19 fibers is demonstrated with 300fs pulses. This result is achieved by controlling both phase and delay variations on each fiber channel in an interferometric measurement setup.

Photonic integration is an appealing technology for emerging applications in communications, medical diagnostics and sensing. Silicon Photonics presents a highly attractive solution for large-scale photonic integration, principally because it is based on well-established CMOS-fabrication technologies. However, Silicon photonics can be difficult and expensive to implement, as it requires complex device design, fabrication and packaging capabilities. Photonic Libraries And Technology for Manufacturing (PLAT4M) is a major European project that brings together the key capabilities required to develop solutions for a range of Silicon photonic-based applications. This paper will present an overview of the PLAT4M project. It will present, in detail, a key application demonstrator (Coherent Beam Combiner), highlighting the ability of the project team to develop an integrated Silicon Photonic sub-system, from design, through to device fabrication, packaging and final test. The paper also highlights the need to consider additional capabilities besides device fabrication, such as packaging, which are critical to achieving fully operational sub-systems.

We developed an improved model in order to predict the RF behavior of the SOA valid for any experimental conditions. It takes into account the dynamic saturation of the SOA, which can be fully characterized by a simple measurement, and only relies on material fitting parameters, independent of the optical intensity and bias current. We used this new model to analyze and model the additive noise of the SOA in order to fully characterize the influence of the slow light effect on the microwave photonics link properties. To cite this article: P. Berger et al., C. R. Physique 10 (2009).

The reconfiguration time of a holographic beam-shaping device using a liquid crystal spatial light modulator (SLM) has been drastically decreased by five orders of magnitude to reach the microsecond range (~5 µs). The method involves an acousto-optic modulator (AOM) placed in front of the SLM which points the laser beam towards different pre-addressed regions of the liquid crystal plate. Because the addressing signal is not changed, the reconfiguration time is mainly governed by the AOM response time. Moreover, this method allows us to clean up the transient regime by suppressing the bleed effect usually observed in the standard SLM reconfiguration.

The XCAN collaboration program between the Ecole Polytechnique and Thales aims at developing a laser system based on the coherent combination of several tens of laser beams produced through a network of amplifying optical fibers [1]. As a first step this project aspires to demonstrate the scalability of a combining architecture in the femtosecond regime providing high peak power with high repetition rate and high efficiency. The initial system will include 61 individual phased beams aimed to provide 10 mJ, 350 fs pulses at 50 kHz.

A compact (15{\mu}m${\times}${\mu}m) and highly-optimized 2${\times}$2 optical switch is demonstrated on a CMOS-compatible photonic crystal technology. On-chip insertion loss are below 1dB, static and dynamic contrast are 40dB and >20dB respectively. Owing to efficient thermo-optic design, the power consumption is below 3 mW while the switching time is 1 {\mu}s., Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures

Coherent beam combining of fiber amplifiers provides an attractive mean of reaching high power laser. In an interferometric phase measurement the beams issued for each fiber combined are imaged onto a sensor and interfere with a reference plane wave. This registration of interference patterns on a camera allows the measurement of the exact phase error of each fiber beam in a single shot. Therefore, this method is a promising candidate toward very large number of combined fibers. Based on this technique, several architectures can be proposed to coherently combine a high number of fibers. The first one based on digital holography transfers directly the image of the camera to spatial light modulator (SLM). The generated hologram is used to compensate the phase errors induced by the amplifiers. This architecture has therefore a collective phase measurement and correction. Unlike previous digital holography technique, the probe beams measuring the phase errors between the fibers are co-propagating with the phase-locked signal beams. This architecture is compatible with the use of multi-stage isolated amplifying fibers. In that case, only 20 pixels per fiber on the SLM are needed to obtain a residual phase shift error below λ/10rms. The second proposed architecture calculates the correction applied to each fiber channel by tracking the relative position of the interference finges. In this case, a phase modulator is placed on each channel. In that configuration, only 8 pixels per fiber on the camera is required for a stable close loop operation with a residual phase error of λ/20rms, which demonstrates the scalability of this concept.

A low-loss and fast optical switch is demonstrated on Silicon-on-Insulator. Low insertion losses (6dB), a large dynamic contrast (30dB) and a wide tuning range (6nm) are achieved with an operating electric power consumption in the milliwatt range.

We investigate the influence of thermally induced higher order aberrations on the fundamental mode of a rod solid-state laser. The perturbations of the laser due to the most common aberrations (spherical aberration and astigmatism) are studied for several sizes of the fundamental mode. Results concerning the additional losses and beam quality degradation induced by these aberrations are also presented and demonstrate that for a large overlapping of the beam size and the laser rod, the spherical aberration amplitude must not exceed 0.5λ for the cavity to oscillate. The influence of gain saturation also analyzed in the model is shown to be of less importance.

Multiferroics are materials with coexisting magnetic and ferroelectric orders, which show potential for electrically controlled spintronic devices. A common application of ferroelectrics is in electro-optical modulators exploiting their electric-field-dependent optical indices. The coupling of optical and magnetic degrees of freedom is attractive for designing multifunctional devices, but to date the electro-optical response of multiferroics has hardly been explored. Here we report a joint experimental and theoretical study of this effect in multiferroic ${\mathrm{BiFeO}}_{3}$ thin films. We confirm the large birefringence present in single crystals and determine the electro-optic coefficients ${r}_{13}$ and ${r}_{33}$. We present approaches to increase the obtained coefficients, for instance, by using tetragonal-like ${\mathrm{BiFeO}}_{3}$, and expand the potential of multiferroics to optical applications.

The application of petawatt lasers to scientific and technological problems is advancing rapidly. The usefulness of these applications will depend on being able to produce petawatt pulses at much higher repetition rates than is presently possible. The International Coherent Amplification Network (ICAN) consortium seeks to design high repetition rate petawatt lasers using large scale coherent beam combination of femtosecond pulse amplifiers built from optical fibres. This combination of technologies has the potential to overcome many of the hurdles to high energy, high average power pulsed lasers, opening up applications and meeting societal challenges.

International audience

International audience; We report on the design of an ultra stable microwave/THz oscillator and on the realization and the characterization of its laser source. The tunable oscillator is expected to show below -150 dB rad2/Hz phase instability at an offset frequency of 10 kHz for a 30 GHz carrier frequency, as well as 18 GHz, 100 GHz, 400 GHz and 1 THz carrier frequencies.

We demonstrate the scalability of fiber phase locking system using interferometric method. The system allows complete phase error map measurement with a /60 rms accuracy in a single acquisition of only 6 pixels per fiber.

The availability of a tunable delay line with a chip-size footprint is a crucial step towards the full implementation of integrated microwave photonic signal processors. Achieving a large and tunable group delay on a millimetre-sized chip is not trivial. Slow light concepts are an appropriate solution, if propagation losses are kept acceptable. Here we use a low-loss 1.5 mm-long photonic crystal waveguide to demonstrate both notch and band-pass microwave filters that can be tuned over the 0 50-GHz spectral band. The waveguide is capable of generating a controllable delay with limited signal attenuation (total insertion loss below 10 dB when the delay is below 70 ps) and degradation. Owing to the very small footprint of the delay line, a fully integrated device is feasible, also featuring more complex and elaborate filter functions., This work was funded by the European Union under the project GOSPEL (grant 219299) and by the Valencian Government (Prometeo GVA 2008-92). We thank S. Hughes and P. Lalanne for enlightening discussion about the impact of disorder in photonic crystal waveguides.

We propose and experimentally demonstrate the suitability of exploiting the dispersive feature of a chip-size delay line to perform microwave photonic filtering tasks. A band-pass microwave filter based on wavelength multiplexing which can be tuned over the 0–50 GHz spectral band is presented. The tunable delay line comprises a low-loss 1.5 mm long photonic crystal waveguide capable of generating a controllable delay exceeding 100 ps, still with limited signal attenuation and degradation.

International audience; We experimentally demonstrate that up-converted coherent population oscillations (CPO) in SOA open the possibility to conceive integrated optical tunable delay lines beyond the carrier lifetime limit, up to THz frequencies.

Fiber lasers provide an attractive means of reaching high output laser power because of their advantages in terms of compactness, reliability, efficiency, and beam quality. Even given these advantages, it is desirable to increase the system power or energy levels beyond what is possible with a single-mode fiber laser. A promising technique is coherent beam combining with active phase locking involving phase detection and active compensation of phase errors [1]. In this Communication, we present coherent phase combining of 64 independent fibers, selectively amplified by 4 optical amplifiers. This is to our knowledge the highest number of combined fibers ever demonstrated. In order to achieve this result, we have developed specific collective components for phase measurement of a large number of fibers, arrays of phase modulators, and an array of collimated fibers.

Slow light systems are particularly attractive for analog signal processing, since their inherent limitation to a delay-bandwidth product of 1 is less critical for analog systems such as those used in microwave photonics. We present here the implementation of two basic functions - phase shifting and true time delaying - fully optically controlled using stimulated Brillouin scattering in optical fibers. The combination of these two functions makes possible the implementation of true time delays without limitation on the microwave carrier frequency using the separate carrier tuning technique. This is illustrated by the implementation of the delaying system for the realization of a microwave tunable notch filter.

International audience; We show how Up-converted Coherent Population Oscillations (UpCPO) enable to get rid of the intrinsic limitation of the carrier lifetime, leading to the generation of time delays at any high frequencies in a single SOA device. The linear dependence of the RF phase shift with respect to the RF frequency is theoretically predicted and experimentally evidenced at 16 and 35 GHz. (C) 2011 Optical Society of America

The ferroelectric bismuth ferrite (BiFeO3) exhibits a strong spontaneous polarization and potentially large electro-optic coefficients. We present our efforts in the design and fabrication of thin film electro-optic modulators based on thin film heterostructures using BiFeO3 as the active modulating medium.

International audience; We present an experimental and numerical investigation of the influence of filtering the red-shifted modulation on the linearity of a microwave-photonics link with a CPO-based phase shifter. Different behavior versus SOA bias current are evidenced.

International audience; We show theoretically and validate experimentally the effect of filtering on the nonlinear behavior of slow and fast light links based on coherent population oscillations in semiconductor optical amplifiers. The existence of a dip in the power-versus-current characteristics for the fundamental frequency, as well as for the third-order intermodulation product, is clearly evidenced. These two dips occur at different bias currents. Their depths increase as the filtering strength of the red sideband is increased, and they completely vanish in the unfiltered case. Influence on the microwave photonics link is discussed.

International audience; We developed a predictive model describing harmonic generation and intermodulation distortions in semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs). This model takes into account the variations of the saturation parameters along the propagation axis inside the SOA, and uses a rigorous expression of the gain oscillations harmonics. We derived the spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR) of a slow light delay line based on coherent population oscillation (CPO) effects, in a frequency range covering radar applications (from 40 kHz up to 30 GHz), and for a large range of injected currents. The influence of the high order distortions in the input microwave spectrum is discussed, and in particular, an interpretation of the SFDR improvement of a Mach-Zehnder modulator by CPOs effects in a SOA is given.