Optical generation of rapidly tunable millimeter wave subcarrier

Several applications, such as frequency chirped lidar-radar systems, optical/wireless communications and biomedical imaging, require optical transmitters that can generate rapidly tunable, low phase noise and low intensity noise millimeter wave sub-carriers. Using an electro-optic Nd:LiNbO/sub 3/ microchip laser in an optical heterodyning scheme, we designed a simple, robust, monolithic and low-cost optical transmitter, that can generate tunable sub-carriers from DC to 50 GHz. Furthermore, we demonstrate that due to the unique approach, whereby the tuning and lasing occur within the same crystal, the dynamics of the tuning process are fast.