Dynamic range enhancement of a novel phase-locked coherent optical phase demodulator.

We report on a novel cancellation technique, for reducing the nonlinearity associated with the tracking phase-modulator in recently proposed phase-locked coherent demodulator for phase modulated analog optical links. The proposed cancellation technique is input RF signal power and frequency independent leading to a significant increase in dynamic range of the coherent demodulator. Furthermore, this technique demonstrates that large values of the signal-to-intermodulation ratio of the demodulated signal can be obtained even though the tracking phase modulator is fairly nonlinear, and thereby relaxing the linearity requirements for the tracking phase modulator. A new model is developed and the calculated results are in good agreement with measurements.