Demonstration of high-fidelity dynamic optical arbitrary waveform generation

We experimentally demonstrate a dynamic line-by-line optical arbitrary waveform generation technique capable of generating continuous and bandwidth scalable high-fidelity waveforms without update rate limitations. Two quadrature modulators are used to create up to three spectral slices that are coherently combined by a passband-shaped multiplexer into a single contiguous spectrum to form complex optical waveforms with up to 30 GHz of bandwidth and 6 ns record lengths. (C) 2010 Optical Society of America