LAUSR

A new photonic scheme for various waveforms generation has been proposed and demonstrated. In the scheme, two cascaded single-drive LiNbO3 Mach-Zehnder modulators serve as pulse shaper and the polarization-dependent character of the modulators is fully exploited and utilized. By arranging the polarization states of the incident light, two different spectra are achieved on two orthogonal polarization components respectively. Finally, the desired waveforms can be obtained by superimposing the photocurrents of the two orthogonal signals on a photodetector. The detailed theoretical analyses and simulations are given. In the experiment, square-shaped waveform, triangular waveform and sawtooth (or reversed-sawtooth) waveform are obtained successfully. Furthermore, an approach to smoothing the sawtooth waveform with fewer harmonics is suggested and verified.