Harmonic injection locking apparatus, methods, and applications
AssigneeUniversity of Central Florida Research Foundation, Inc.
InventorsPeter J. Delfyett, Ricardo Bustos Ramirez, Michael E. Plascak
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Abstract
Apparatus and methods demonstrate a chip-scale direct optical to RF link that frequency divides up to 120 GHz optical frequency combs to 10 GHz using harmonic multi-tone injection locking. The embodied invention links widely separated optical frequency combs in the millimeter wave regime (>120 GHz) or THz domain (100s of GHz to THz domain), e.g., microresonator-based frequency combs, which are currently outside of the photo-detection region, into the microwave domain (10s of GHz) where it can be easily photo-detected and controlled. The technique works as a perfect optical divider, using a mode-locked laser and optical injection locking as the technique to phase-lock both lasers.
Claims11
A timing signal generator, comprising:
- a slave oscillator having a free-running frequency that is a sub-harmonic of a non-directly detectable master oscillator terahertz (THz) frequency input to the slave oscillator,
- wherein when the slave oscillator free-running frequency is injection locked by the non-directly detectable master THz frequency, the slave oscillator has an output in a bandwidth that is directly detectable.
A method for frequency division of a non-directly detectable terahertz (THz) frequency timing signal to a directly detectable timing signal, comprising:
- providing a slave oscillator having a free-running frequency frep;
- injection locking the slave oscillator with at least two millimeter wave- or THz range-separated tones of the THz timing signal having a repetition rate nfrep that is a harmonic of frep, where n is an integer, such that the at least two tones are down-converted into a directly detectable output signal in the GHz/microwave domain.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.