TY - JOUR AU - Mandridis, Dimitrios AB - In this work we present a method for improving the uniformity of the optical spectrum or the temporal intensity profile of a quasi-CW, linearly chirped laser source covering the time interval between subsequent pulses. A novel laser cavity design, referred to as the Theta (рда) cavity, provides linearly chirped pulses directly from the laser oscillator that having non-uniform optical spectrum, that is mapped into the temporal intensity profile of the pulse, due to the frequency-to-time mapping nature of this cavity design. The system developed in this work has been designed to improve the spectral and temporal intensity profile of lasers for photonic signal processing. A fiberized feed-forward system is implemented to reduce variations in the temporal intensity profile, or the optical spectrum due to the time-to-frequency mapping, input to the system. In the feedforward scheme presented, the quasi-CW pulse train generated from the laser is split and part of it is photodetected, while the electrical signal generated alters the transmittance of the second part of the input as it goes through an amplitude modulator, resulting in increase in the uniformity of the signal. The contrast of the optical spectrum of a chirped pulse at input to the system is improved from 51% to 16%, or 3.1 times. TI - A feedforward system for dynamic equalization of a chirped laser source suitable For photonic analog-to-digital conversion JF - Proceedings of SPIE DO - 10.1117/12.820686 DA - 2009-05-01 UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/spie/a-feedforward-system-for-dynamic-equalization-of-a-chirped-laser-wXSs0k1MCL SP - 733904 EP - 733904-12 VL - 7339 IS - 1 DP - DeepDyve ER -