Investigation of temporal Talbot operation in a conventional optical tapped delay line structure

Abstract

We propose a novel scheme of temporal Talbot effect achieving optical pulse train repetition-rate multiplication in a conventional tapped delay line structure. While it is generally used for spectral amplitude filtering, we show that such architecture could also be configured for spectral phase-only filtering, as well as for a combination of amplitude and phase filtering regimes. We theoretically derive and numerically simulate the working principle of the concept, followed by a proof-of-principle experimental demonstration using an off-the-shelf Mach-Zehnder delay line interferometer, which corresponds to the simplest version of the proposed structure. We address the efficiency, and potential performance degradation in the presence of power imbalance and delay line length inaccuracy of the architecture, together with applied phase error.