Phase and amplitude measurements for high bandwidth optical signals

Abstract

In this paper a novel technique for obtaining the amplitude and phase of optical pulses with time extents as short as tens of ps is presented. The method which is based on the transport-of-intensity equation only requires, for a practical realization, of passive fiber optic devices. It employs as the main component a dispersive element with a known second order dispersion coefficient. Two different setup implementations are considered, for which simulations are carried out in order to test the method performance taking into account both, realizable models of the involved devices and typical pulses found in optical transmission systems. The characterization of optical pulses affected by dispersion and nonlinear effects, such as self-phase modulation, is used to evaluate the performance of the method and show the practical feasibility of the future implementation.