Analysis of harmonic distortion involved in microwave photonic filters

We present a theoretical and experimental analysis of nonlinear microwave photonic filters. Far from the conventional condition of low modulation index to neglect high-order terms, we analyze the harmonic distortion involved in microwave photonic structures to profit the filtering properties. We demonstrate that it is possible to design microwave photonic filter to reduce the harmonic distortion by achieving a high linearity in the system performance under large signal operation.