Multi-wavelength arbitrary waveform generation through spectro-temporal unitary transformations

Abstract

Temporal waveform manipulation is a fundamental functionality in optics and crucial for applications like optical communications, microwave photonics and quantum optics. Traditional IQ- or phase-amplitude modulators shape light by carving energy from the input lightwave and are thus fundamentally lossy, and cannot apply independent modulation to multiple input wavelengths simultaneously. Taking inspiration from the space-time duality, we produce arbitrary unitary spectro-temporal transformations on multiple temporal input vectors with a modulation structure comprising of only lossless phase modulation and dispersive allpass filtering. The bandwidth of the output waveforms is not restricted by the driving electronics and independent transformations can be performed simultaneously on multiple orthogonal inputs such as spectrally separated frequency tones. This overcomes the main limitations of traditional electro-optic modulators and offers fundamental new insight into temporal wave manipulation.