Injection-locked fiber laser for tunable millimeter-wave generation.

A dual-ring injection-locked fiber laser consisting of a ring of optoelectronic oscillator (OEO) and a ring of fiber laser is proposed and demonstrated for tunable millimeter-wave (mm-wave) generation. The approach combines the advantages of mm-wave generation based on OEOs and fiber lasers, which can generate a high-frequency, low-phase-noise, and a mode-hopping-free mm-wave signal with a large tuning range. A low-phase-noise mm-wave signal with a tunable frequency of 30-50 GHz and a tuning step of 10 GHz is obtained in a proof-of-concept experiment. The tuning range can be as large as 140 GHz if a high bandwidth photodetector is applied.