Attosecond electronic timing with rising edges of photocurrent pulses

Abstract

There has been remarkable progress in generating ultralow-noise microwaves from optical frequency combs in the last decade. While a combination of techniques has enabled tens to hundreds of attoseconds residual jitter in microwave extraction, so far most of research efforts have been focused on extracting single-tone microwaves from combs; there has been no study on the noise properties of photocurrent pulses directly extracted from the photodiode. Here, we reveal that the residual jitter between optical pulses and rising edges of photocurrent pulses can be in the tens of attoseconds regime. The rising-edge jitter is much lower than the falling-edge jitter, and further, this ultralow rising-edge jitter could be obtained by both p-i-n and (modified-)uni-travelling-carrier photodiodes. This finding can be directly used for various edge-sensitive timing applications, and further shows the potential for ultrahigh-precision timing using silicon-photonic-integrable on-chip p-i-n photodiodes.

Ultralow-noise microwave extraction from optical frequency combs using photocurrent pulse shaping with balanced photodetection

“…By simply replacing a single photodiode with a balanced photodetector (BPD) and delaying one of the optical pulse inputs, microwave of interest from both photodiodes can be added constructively to obtain higher-power microwave during the OE conversion. While we recently found that the photocurrent pulse shaping can reduce the edge jitters of photocurrent pulse itself 14 , in this work, we found that the same configuration enables power enhancement and white-noise reduction in microwave extraction. With the appropriate delay shift between two optical pulses, the output 10-GHz microwave signal has been increased by 6 dB compared to typical single photodetection case with MZI-PRRM.…”

Massively parallel electro-optic sampling of space-encoded optical pulses for ultrafast multi-dimensional imaging

“… 37 – 40 for more information on the operation principle of the EOS-TD). Here the EOS-TD can detect the relative timing and TOF changes between optical pulses and frequency-locked periodic electric waveforms, such as photocurrent pulses derived from high-speed photodetection 42 or timing-synchronized microwave signals 38 , 40 , 43 , with attosecond-level resolution. While the EOS-TD was recently used to measure the single-point TOF of ~300-fs-long optical pulses with sub-nanometre resolution 44 , in this work, we showed that sub-nanometre axial resolution can be obtained for sub-pulses with >90 ps pulse width as well, allowing massively parallel TOF detection of >1000 sub-pulses over a several mm-long horizontal coordinate.…”

Massively parallel electro-optic sampling of space-encoded optical pulses for ultrafast multi-dimensional imaging

“…Here the EOS-TD can detect the relative timing and TOF changes between optical pulses and frequencylocked periodic electric waveforms, such as photocurrent pulses derived from high-speed photodetection 40 or timing-synchronized microwave signals 36,38,41 , with attosecond-level resolution. While the EOS-TD was recently used to measure the single-point TOF of ~ 300-fs-long optical pulses with sub-nanometre resolution 42 , in this work, we showed that sub-nanometre axial resolution can be obtained for sub-pulses with > 90 ps pulse width as well, allowing massively parallel TOF detection of > 1000 subpulses over a several mm-long horizontal coordinate.…”