Coherent photonic RF channelization based on stimulated brillouin scattering

A novel high-resolution channelizer based on dual coherent optical frequency combs (OFCs) and stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) is proposed and demonstrated. In the proposed scheme, the frequency components of a wideband RF signal are sliced into a number of parallel parts and converted into signals with the same center frequency. The bandwidth of each frequency slice is determined by the gain bandwidth of the SBS (tens of MHz), and all the information in the RF signal is retained after the channelization. An experiment is carried out. Photonic RF channelization with channel spacing of 80 MHz and a crosstalk suppression of more than 16.79 dB is realized.