An Experiment for Generating the 14-Tone Stable Carriers Using Recirculating Frequency Shifter

In experiment, the generation of 14-tone stable carriers with recirculating frequency shifter is realized. Some factors that impact the performance of the carrier generation are discussed. It is experimentally found that the balance and the insertion loss of the inphase/quadrature (I/Q) modulator, the accurate π/2 phase difference and equal power level of two rf signals which are applied to the two ports of the I/Q modulator, the gain of the optical amplifier, the bandwidth and sharp window spectrum of the tunable filter and the stability of the optical signals' states of polarization fed into I/Q modulator, play important roles in the generation of a stable multi-tone carrier source. By employing appropriate techniques we obtain 14-tone stable carriers in the experiment.