An Ultralow Phase Noise Coupled Optoelectronic Oscillator

Ultralow jitter optical pulse sources are much needed in optical communications, optical sampling, and metrology applications. We report a coupled optoelectronic oscillator employing nonpolarization-maintaining components and an erbium-doped fiber amplifier that generates 9.4-GHz microwave signals with -150-dBc/Hz phase noise at 10- to 100-kHz offset, and 2-fs jitter (integrated in 100-Hz to 100-kHz range) optical pulses. To our knowledge, this is the lowest phase noise and time jitter reported in the same frequency range for such mode-locked laser-based systems