Photonic mm-Wave Generation Using a Double Passband Fiber Bragg Grating Filter

We report a simplified version of a mm-wave generator employing the sideband filtering technique which uses a single optical sideband filter. Instead of using a Mach-Zehnder-like fiber network to select a pair of sidebands, we employ a single Fabry-Perot fiber Bragg grating with a pair of passbands separated by the mm-wave frequency. Using a single filter eliminated the need for polarization control and pathlength matching that was required by the former interferometer-like arrangement. We describe a 30 GHz generator design and present its mm-wave signal spectrum showing an instrument-limited linewidth of ~20 Hz. The generation of such an extremely narrow signal spectrum from a laser with a 1 MHz linewidth demonstrates the remarkable laser frequency noise cancellation property of the sideband filtering technique.