Photonics-enabled wavelet-like transform via nonlinear optical frequency sweeping and stimulated Brillouin scattering-based frequency-to-time mapping

Abstract: A photonics-enabled wavelet-like transform system, characterized by multi-resolution time-frequency analysis, is proposed based on a typical stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) pump-probe setup using an optical nonlinear frequency-sweep signal. In the pump path, a continuous-wave optical signal is injected into an SBS medium to generate an SBS gain. In the probe path, a periodic nonlinear frequency-sweep optical signal with a time-varying chirp rate is generated, which is then modulated at a Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM) by the electrical signal under test (SUT). The optical signal from the MZM is selectively amplified by the SBS gain and converted back to the electrical domain using a low-speed photodetector, implementing the periodic SBS-based frequency-to-time mapping (FTTM). The frequency-domain information corresponding to different periods is mapped to the time domain via the FTTM in the form of low-speed electrical pulses, which is then spliced to analyze the time-frequency relationship of the SUT in real-time. The time-varying chirp rate in each sweep period makes the signals with different frequencies have different frequency resolutions in the FTTM process, which is very similar to the characteristics of the wavelet transform, so we call it wavelet-like transform. An experiment is carried out. Multi-resolution time-frequency analysis of a variety of RF signals is carried out in a 4-GHz bandwidth limited only by the equipment.