LAUSR

Wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) schemes have greatly increased optical transmission capacity, especially when using massively parallel optical frequency combs (OFCs) as carriers. In this paper, we show that linear optical sampling (LOS) is a kind of multiheterodyne process and it can be performed with arbitrary-shaped periodic waveforms. Meanwhile, it can be used for characterizing WDM signals with only a single receiving channel. We successfully demonstrate an observation of 40 WDM channels with 1 THz total bandwidth and total 800 Gbit/s data rate by only using one sampling channel. We show that the adoption of the concept of multiheterodyne detection can improve the performance of LOS technique, and can also greatly simplify multi-channel WDM monitoring systems.