Photonic synthesis of high fidelity microwave arbitrary waveforms using near field frequency to time mapping

Photonic radio-frequency (RF) arbitrary waveform generation (AWG) based on spectral shaping and frequency-to-time mapping has received substantial attention. This technique, however, is critically constrained by the far-field condition which imposes strict limits on the complexity of the generated waveforms. The time bandwidth product (TBWP) decreases as the inverse of the RF bandwidth which limits one from exploiting the full TBWP available from modern pulse shapers. Here we introduce a new RF-AWG technique which we call near-field frequency-to-time mapping. This approach overcomes the previous restrictions by predistorting the amplitude and phase of the spectrally shaped optical signal to achieve high fidelity waveforms with radically increased TBWP in the near field region. (c) 2013 Optical Society of America