Photonically-Synthesized Waveforms to Combat Broadband Antenna Phase Distortions

We review our work in photonically enabled arbitrary electromagnetic waveform generation. Here, we emphasize a technique based on Fourier transform optical pulse shaping that enables user-defined radio-frequency waveforms with frequency content spanning the ~1-11 GHz range. We highlight the capabilities of this technique by demonstrating our apparatus may be used to combat waveform distortions arising from the nonuniform phase response of broadband antennas. In this work, we demonstrate compression (dispersion compensation) of waveforms with up to 10 GHz bandwidth at a center frequency of 6 GHz.