Abstract

Recent theoretical¹ and experimental² research has established that the use of pseudorandom coded phase-reversed electrode structures can provide substantial improvement in the frequency response of LiNbO₃ traveling-wave integrated-optic modulators. Although the magnitude of the frequency response of these devices is greatly extended, their phase response exhibits considerable nonlinearity, which prevents the device impulse response from attaining its transform-limited extent (the reciprocal of the extended bandwidth). Recently³ we proposed electro-optic sampling and fast optical pulse generation techniques directly in the time domain to overcome these limitations and to allow time domain performance of these devices to be consistent with their performance in the frequency domain. Here we present, to our knowledge for the first time, experimental results for an electrical sampler as proposed in Ref. ³. Its sampling aperture is determined not by the device impulse response but by its autocorrelation function. The autocorrelation function is much shorter in duration for a device with spread spectrum coded electrodes.

© 1990 Optical Society of America