Biased Balance Detection for Fiber Optical Frequency Comb Based Linear Optical Sampling

Linear optical sampling (LOS) is a powerful technique to circumvent the electronic bottleneck arising in optical modulation analyzer (OMA). To extend the range of operation wavelength for the LOS-based OMA, the fiber optical frequency comb (FOFC) is proposed to replace the narrowband mode-locked fiber laser (NMFL) as an optical sampling source. However, this procedure reduces the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), due to the constraints of the unideal response of balanced photodetector (BPD) and the limited power per FOFC tone. Here, we investigate the biased balance detection (BBD) scheme to overcome such issue. Our simulation results show that, the characterization performance of the FOFC-based LOS with the help of the BBD scheme is almost the same as that of the NMFL-based LOS, when the PDM-QPSK/16QAM/64QAM signals are set as the signal under test (SUT). Meanwhile, we find that the dynamic range of SUT input power is determined by the BPD imbalance and the FOFC power. By increasing either the average power of the FOFC from 4 to 10 mW or the imbalance of the BPD from 1.03 to 1.04, we can enhance the dynamic range of SUT input power by 8.8 mW and 6.6 mW, respectively. Finally, we develop the equipment and experimentally verify the BBD scheme by a precise characterization of 32 GBaud PDM-QPSK signal.