Phase noise accumulation in recirculating frequency shifting loop based programmable optical frequency comb

The phenomenon of linewidth continuously broadening along with the recirculation number in recirculating frequency shifting loop is observed. In this paper, a novel method of measuring the phase noise accumulation induced by EDFA in recirculating frequency shifting loop is proposed and the experiment results support the viewpoint of the laser linewidth will be broadening by EDFA. An empirical formula has been extracted to estimate the linewidth deterioration of the RFS output. We demonstrate the relationship between the linewidth and the recirculation number of the RFS based optical frequency comb in both theoretically and experimentally. By employing the recirculation frequency shifting loop, the phase noise accumulation induced by EDFA could be measured obviously and the linewidth of each tone can be measured precisely.