An approach to photonic generation of high-frequency phase-coded RF pulses

A novel method to generate high-frequency phase-coded R pulses using all-fiber components is proposed. The system consists of a mode-locked fiber laser (MLFL), a dispersive element, an unbalanced Mach-Zehnder interferometer (UMZI), an optical phase modulator (PM), and a photodetector (PD). The PM is incorporated in one arm of the UMZI. In the system, an ultrashort pulse generated by the MLFL is broadened and chirped after passing through the dispersive element, which is then sent to the UMZI, to get two time-delayed chirped pulses. By beating the time-delayed chirped pulses at the PD, an RF pulse with its frequency dependent on the time delay difference is obtained. The generated RF pulse can be phase coded if an encoding signal is applied to the PM. A theoretical model is presented which is verified by experiments. The generation of RF pulses with binary phase coding is also experimented.