Experimental investigation of noise reduction in an opto-microwave link based on highly-dispersive low-loss fiber

A dispersion compensating fiber exhibiting low losses is used to study the phase to amplitude noise and amplitude to phase noise conversion mechanisms with a very good signal-to-noise ratio over a 20 GHz bandwidth. It is shown that the large frequency noise of semiconductor lasers and the losses in the fiber restrain this technique from efficiently reducing the relative intensity noise to improve the dynamic range of opto-microwave links. However, these properties are proved to be useful to precisely characterize the laser phase noise over a large bandwidth.