Optically referenced broadband electronic synthesizer with 15 digits of resolution

Published

September 5, 2016

Author(s)

Franklyn J. Quinlan, Tara M. Fortier, A. Rolland, Frederick N. Baynes, A. J. Metcalf, Archita Hati, Andrew D. Ludlow, Nathan M. Hinkley, M. Shimizu, Joe Campbell, Scott A. Diddams

Abstract

Increasing demands in the high tech industry for higher data rates and better synchronization necessitates the development of new wideband and tunable sources with improved noise performance over traditional synthesis based quartz oscillators. Precision synthesis is paramount for providing frequency references and timing in a broad range of applications including 5G telecommunications, high precision measurement, electronic warfare, and radar and sensing. In this Article we describe a photonic-digital synthesizer based on optical frequency division that enables the generation of widely tunable signals from near DC to 100 GHz with a fractional frequency instability of 1 part in 10¹⁵. The spectral purity of the derived signals represents an improvement in close-to-carrier noise performance over the current state- of-the-art of nearly 7 orders of magnitude in the W-band (100GHz), and up to 5 orders of magnitude in the X-band (10 GHz).

Citation

Nature Photonics

Pub Type

Journals

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Keywords

microwave photonics, optical frequency combs, phase noise, shot noise, ultrafast optics

Citation

Quinlan, F. , Fortier, T. , Rolland, A. , Baynes, F. , Metcalf, A. , Hati, A. , Ludlow, A. , Hinkley, N. , Shimizu, M. , Campbell, J. and Diddams, S. (2016), Optically referenced broadband electronic synthesizer with 15 digits of resolution, Nature Photonics, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=918688 (Accessed October 17, 2025)