Phase noise characterization by carrier suppression techniques in RF photonic systems

We propose and demonstrate a novel approach to measure the phase noise in radio-frequency photonic systems by employing a suppressed carrier technique. With this technique, the flicker phase noise floor is reduced by 36 dB. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that the phase noise of a photodetector is measured, and found to be -126 dBc/Hz at 1 Hz from the carrier at 8.4 GHz.