Photonic chip based tunable and reconfigurable narrowband microwave photonic filter using stimulated Brillouin scattering

We report the first demonstration of a photonic chip based dynamically reconfigurable, widely tunable, narrow pass-band, high Q microwave photonic filter (MPF). We exploit stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) in a 6.5 cm long chalcogenide (As2S3) photonic chip to demonstrate a MPF that exhibited a high quality factor of similar to 520 and narrow bandwidth and was dynamically reconfigurable and widely tunable. It maintained a stable 3 dB bandwidth of 23 +/- 2MHz and amplitude of 20 +/- 2 dB over a large frequency tuning range of 2-12 GHz. By tailoring the pump spectrum, we reconfigured the 3 dB bandwidth of the MPF from similar to 20 MHz to similar to 40 MHz and tuned the shape factor from 3.5 to 2 resulting in a nearly flat-topped filter profile. This demonstration represents a significant advance in integrated microwave photonics with potential applications in on-chip microwave signal processing for RADAR and analogue communications. (C) 2012 Optical Society of America