Nonlinear time-lens with improved power efficiency through a discrete multilevel pump

• DOI: 10.1364/ol.396342
• Publication Date: 2020-05-26T12:00:17Z
• Authors: Manuel P. Fernández; Luis Romero Cortés; Saikrishna R. Kon...; Benjamin Crockett; Laureano A. Bulus...; Pablo A. Costanzo...; José Azaña
• Keywords: https://purl.org/becyt/ford/2.2; Time-Lens; 0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering; Temporal Talbot Array Illuminators; 02 engineering and technology; https://purl.org/becyt/ford/2

We report a novel, to the best of our knowledge, all-optical discrete multilevel time-lens (DM-TL) design based on cross-phase modulation (XPM). In this approach, the pump is synthesized such as the quadratic phase modulation is applied to the probe in constant-level time-bins with a maximum phase excursion of

2

π

. As a result, a considerable reduction in the required pump power is achieved in comparison to the conventional approach based on a parabolic pump. To illustrate the concept, the proposed DM-TL is here applied to the energy-preserving conversion of a continuous-wave (CW) signal into a train of pulses according to the theory of temporal Talbot array illuminators. We demonstrate CW-to-pulse conversion gains up to 12 at repetition rates exceeding 16 GHz, with a power saving with respect to the conventional parabolic TL that is more significant for increasing conversion gains.