Coupled opto-electronic oscillators

We present experimental results of coupled optoelectronic oscillators (COEO) constructed with a semiconductor optical amplifier based ring laser and a semiconductor colliding pulse mode-locked laser. Each COEO can simultaneously generate short optical pulses and spectrally pure RF signals. With these devices, we obtained optical pulses as short as 6.2 picoseconds and RF signals as high, in frequency, as 18 GHz with a spectral purity comparable with a HP8561B synthesizer. These experiments demonstrate that COEOs are promising compact sources for generating low jitter optical pulses and low phase noise RF/millimeter wave signals.