Lossless pulse intensity repetition rate multiplication using optical all-pass filtering

Summary form only given. In the development of new-generation optical communication systems, it is of great interest to generate a highly repetitive optical pulse train with a repetition rate of tens and hundreds of GHz. Since it may not be easy to obtain such high pulse-rate pulses directly from lasers, one thus needs some efficient methods to increase the pulse-rate outside the laser cavity. Multiplexing the pulses in the time domain or spectral filtering in the frequency domain are the commonly used approaches, although they either require the provision of proper time delays and/or suffer from a large optical loss. In the present paper we propose a novel scheme that can multiply the pulse intensity repetition rate by using optical all-pass filtering. The scheme is in principle lossless and the multiplication factor of the pulse rate can be any given integer.