INTERFERE - Arbiträre Digitale Verarbeitung von Signalen mit THz-Bandbreite mit Hilfe Optisch-Elektronisch-Optischer Interferometer

Over the past decade, development in coherent transceiver technologies has redefined our ability to analyze, synthesize, and manipulate optical fields across time, frequency, quadrature, and polarization. Signal processing functions that seemed to be realizable only in the optical domain due to electronic bandwidth limitations and digital signal processing (DSP) constraints, can now also be realized by high-performance digital processing of the optical field. An interesting example of that paradigm shift is an optic-electronic-optic (OEO) interferometer, which can potentially extend the functionality of conventional Mach-Zehnder interferometers (MZI) towards arbitrary linear, non-linear, and even time-variable functions. For that purpose, it uses fully coherent optical field digitization, followed by DSP and subsequent broadband electrical-to-optical conversion. The aim of this project is a first experimental demonstration of an OEO interferometer based on an integrated optics framework.