Development of a Mach-Zehnder Modulator Photonic Local Oscillator Source

This paper describes the development of a photonic local oscillator (LO) source based on a 3-stage Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM) device. The MZM laser synthesizer demonstrates the feasibility of providing the photonic reference LO for the Atacama Large Millimeter Array telescope located in Chile. This MZM approach to generating an LO by radio RF modulation of a monochromatic optical source provides the merits of wide frequency coverage of 4-130 GHz, tuning speed of about 0.2 seconds, and residual integrated phase noise performance of 0.3 degrees RMS at 100 GHz.