Chipscale, single-shot gated ultrafast optical recorder.

We introduce a novel, chipscale device capable of single-shot ultrafast recording with picosecond-scale resolution over hundreds of picoseconds of record length. The device consists of two vertically-stacked III-V planar waveguides forming a Mach-Zehnder interferometer, and makes use of a transient, optically-induced phase difference to sample a temporal waveform injected into the waveguides. The pump beam is incident on the chip from above in the form of a diagonally-oriented stripe focused by a cylindrical lens. Due to time-of-flight, this diagonal orientation enables the sampling window to be shifted linearly in time as a function of position across the lateral axis of the waveguides. This time-to-space mapping allows an ordinary camera to record the ultrafast waveform with high fidelity. We investigate the theoretical limits of this technique, present a simulation of device operation, and report a proof-of-concept experiment in GaAs, demonstrating picosecond-scale resolution over 140 ps of record length.

A photonic analog-to-digital converter based on an unbalanced Mach-Zehnder quantizer.

A Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM) based analog to digital converter (ADC) is described. The signal to be digitized is applied to a single electrode of a high speed unbalanced modulator that acts as a quantizer. The rest of the system consists of commercially available wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) components. Analysis indicates that 6 bit operation at 40 Giga Samples per second (GS/s) is possible with moderate optical carrier power.

Solid-state ultrafast all-optical streak camera enabling high-dynamic-range picosecond recording.

We demonstrate an ultrafast optical recording system based on a novel optical beam deflection technique. An optical pump temporarily creates an array of prisms that deflect an optical signal beam within a GaAs/AlGaAs planar waveguide. The fabricated device yielded, to our knowledge, the fastest sustained optical deflection reported to date and was used to create spatial representations of ultrafast temporal waveforms. A conventional camera was then used to record single-shot waveforms with a 2.5 ps resolution over a 50 ps record with a dynamic range in excess of 3000:1. Through further development, this all-optical streak camera could provide insight into previously unmeasurable phenomena in many fields.