New photonic deices for ultrafast pulse processing operating on the basis of the diffraction-dispersion analogy

Abstract

The space-time analogy is a well-known topic within wae optics that brings together some results from beam diffraction and pulse dispersion. On the aboe basis, and taking as starting point some classical concepts in Optics, seeral photonic deices hae been proposed during the last few years with application in rapidly eoling fields such as ultrafast (femtosecond) optics or RF and microwae signal processing. In this contribution, we briefly reiew the aboe ideas with particular emphasis in the generation of trains of ultrafast pulses from periodic modulation of the phase of a CW laser source. This is the temporal analogue of Fresnel diffraction by a pure phase grating. Finally, we extend the analogy to the partially coherent case, what enables us to design an original technique for waelength-to-time mapping of the spectrum of a temporally stationary source. Results of laboratory experiments concerning the generation of user-defined radio-frequency waeforms and filtering of microwae signals will be shown. The deices are operated with low-cost incoherent sources. © 2008 IOP Publishing Ltd.