Optical frequency comb generator for coherent WDM system in Tb/s applications

This paper presents a theoretical analysis and an experimental demonstration of an optical comb generator. Based on the recirculating frequency shifting technique, it targets high capacity applications that require high spectral efficiency and dispersion resilient transmission, such as optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). The generator relies on the use of coherent and orthogonal multi-carrier (Coherent WDM) that makes use of a single laser source (seed). As far as we know, the theoretical model described here is presented for the first time. We experimentally demonstrate the generation of 26 comb lines with optical signal to noise ratio from 25 to 35 dB, in a spectral window of ~ 4 nm. The theoretical analysis prediction has shown excellent agreement with the experimental results.