Photonic generation of ultrawideband signals by exploiting gain saturation of dark pump pulse with double undershoots in a highly nonlinear fiber

We have proposed and theoretically demonstrated an alternative photonic scheme to generate ultrawideband (UWB) doublet pulses based on gain saturation effect in one piece of highly nonlinear fiber (HNLF). A flexible format swap between UWB doublet and monocycle pulses can be successfully realized by properly tuning the optical tunable delay line (ODL). Moreover, the key parameters for UWB pulse, including the center frequency (Fc), 10 dB bandwidth (BW_10dB), and fractional bandwidth (FBW), are also investigated with Fc being Einstein shift when the doublet pulse transforms into the monocycle pulse. Finally, our proposed scheme exhibits good performance that the obtained UWB pulse can have a FBW of > 100% at the Fc of ~ 7 GHz and UWB-over-fiber technology is also implemented without dispersion management.