Terahertz Optoelectronic Down-Conversion and Phase-Locking Through Four-Wave Mixing

Optoelectronic down-conversion of a terahertz optical beatnote to a RF intermediate frequency is performed with a standard Mach-Zehnder modulator followed by a zero dispersion-slope highly nonlinear fiber. The two interleaved optical combs obtained by four-wave mixing are shown to contain more than 75 harmonics enabling to conveniently recover the phase noise of a beatnote at 770 GHz at ~500 MHz. This simple four-wave mixing assisted down-conversion architecture is implemented to a two-frequency solid-state laser in order to directly phase-lock its frequency difference. This is illustrated on a beatnote at 168 GHz directly phase locked to the local oscillator at 10 MHz.