Electronically synthesized Nyquist pulses for photonic sampling of microwave signals

We report electronic generation of optical Nyquist pulses using an arbitrary waveform generator (AWG) followed by a Mach Zehnder modulator (MZM), providing a simple, highly stable and flexible technique to perform photonic sampling. Here, we demonstrate the generation of 10 GHz periodic optical Nyquist pulses by synthesizing both all-positive and alternate positive-negative electrical pulse trains using a 25 GHz bandwidth AWG. Biasing the MZM at null ensures the meeting of the Nyquist ISI-free criterion in the optical domain and allows for pulse compression. Moreover, we report the first photonic sampling and demodulation of 1 Gbaud 16- and 32-QAM signals up to 22.5 GHz using 10 GHz optical Nyquist sampling pulse trains. Published by The Optical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.