Measurements of harmonic distortion produced by a saturated optical amplifier with a nonlinear microwave network analyzer

This paper presents a method to measure the harmonic distortion produced by optical amplifiers. Therefore, a recently developed nonlinear-network measurement system has been extended with a laser source and a detector. A proposal for shifting the absolute calibration plane from the electrical to the optical plane is given. The experimental results show that the saturated optical amplifier does not significantly increase the harmonic distortion of the applied modulated optical input signal.