Coherent Ultrafast Optical Signal Processing Using Stabilized Optical Frequency Combs

随着计算机、手机和平板电脑等技术通过互联网连接起来，对带宽的需求不断增加。关键的商业活动，如电子商务、银行交易、股票交易和高带宽服务的传输，如流媒体视频和游戏，也有助于对带宽的巨大需求。随着对带宽的访问增加，新的开发应用程序成为可能。这些新的应用程序是通过访问增加的带宽来实现的，这会消耗更多的带宽，从而增加需求。这导致对带宽的需求不断增加。随着带宽需求的增加，对带宽的分配、传输和处理提出了新的要求，从而产生了开发新设备技术的需求。此外，可能需要考虑基于新兴设备技术的新系统架构。为了满足不断增长的带宽需求，需要开发新的光子技术和通信、计算和信号处理方法。开发通信、计算和信号处理新技术和新方法的意义和重要性在于，这些新设备和新方法将更加节能、紧凑和具有成本效益，从而实现宽带、无处不在和低成本的应用和服务。随着这些服务变得更加普遍和低成本，这些高带宽环境将被广泛的人口访问，从而提高国家的整体智力和经济实力。我们建议利用注入锁定微腔激光振荡器（如垂直腔面发射激光器）的独特特性来发展超宽带光通信和信号处理技术。该方法利用了从多波长频率梳激光器中同时选择单个波长分量的能力，并实现了高速调制或检测功能。这些器件将用于超快相干并行信号处理架构，实现从格式无关的光通信、光采样、光任意波形生成和检测等功能。预计多波长梳状激光器与垂直腔面发射激光阵列相结合，可以提供每秒5太比特的处理、通信和计算速度，相当于100万个电视频道。知识意义在于，新开发的技术将使研究人员能够构思出新的方法来应对传输和处理大量数据的挑战，这已被确定为21世纪的重大挑战之一。此外，年轻的科学家和工程师将在这些尖端技术领域接受培训，从而能够迅速将这些方法纳入商业工业。

The demand for bandwidth continues to increase, as technologies such as computers, cell phone, and tablets, become connected through the internet. Key business activities, such as e-commerce, bank transactions, stock trading, and the transmission of high bandwidth services, such as streaming video and gaming, also contribute to the significant demand for bandwidth. New developing applications become possible given that the access to bandwidth increases. These new applications are enabled by access to increased bandwidth, resulting in the consumption of more bandwidth and thus increasing the demand. This results in a situation of ever increasing demands for bandwidth. As the demand for bandwidth increases, new approaches in the distribution, transmission and processing of this bandwidth are required, thus generating the need for the development of new device technologies. In addition, new system architectures may need to be considered based on emerging device technologies. The development of new photonic technologies and approaches to communication, computing and signal processing are needed to keep ahead of the continually increasing demand for bandwidth. The significance and importance of developing new technologies and methods for communications, computing and signal processing is that these new devices and approaches will be more energy efficient, compact, and cost effective, resulting in applications and services that are broadband, ubiquitous and low cost. As these services become more ubiquitous and low cost, access to these high bandwidth environments will be accessible to a broad population, thus improving the overall intellectual and economic strength of the Nation.We propose to develop ultra-broadband optical communication and signal processing technologies relying on the unique properties of injection locked micro-cavity laser oscillators such as the Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Laser. The approaches exploit the ability to simultaneously select single wavelength components from a multi-wavelength frequency comb laser, and realize high speed modulation or detection functionality. These devices will then be used in an ultrafast coherent parallel signal processing architecture, realizing functionality ranging from format independent optical communications, optical sampling, optical arbitrary waveform generation and detection. It is anticipated that multi-wavelength comb lasers combined with vertical cavity surface emitting laser arrays could provide processing, communication and computing speeds of 5 terabits per second, equivalent to 1 million TV channels. The intellectual significance is that the newly developed technologies will enable researchers to conceive of new approaches to the challenges of transmitting and processing massive amounts of data, which has been identified as one of the grand challenges in the 21 century. In addition, young scientists and engineers will be trained in these cutting edge technological areas, thus allowing for the rapid incorporation of these approaches into commercial industry.