Photonics-assisted microwave pulse detection and frequency measurement based on pulse replication and frequency-to-time mapping

A photonics-assisted microwave pulse detection and frequency measurement scheme is proposed. The unknown microwave pulse is converted to the optical domain and then injected into a fiber loop for pulse replication, which makes it easier to identify the microwave pulse with a large pulse repetition interval (PRI), whereas stimulated Brillouin scattering-based frequency-to-time mapping (FTTM) is utilized to measure the carrier frequency of the microwave pulse. A sweep optical carrier is generated and modulated by the unknown microwave pulse and a continuous-wave (CW) single-frequency reference, generating two different frequency sweep optical signals, which are combined and used as the probe wave to detect a fixed Brillouin gain spectrum. When the optical signal is detected in a photodetector, FTTM is realized, and the frequency of the microwave pulse can be determined. An experiment is performed. For a fiber loop containing a 210-m fiber, pulse replication and FTTM of the pulses with a PRI of 20 µs and pulse widths of 1.20, 1.00, 0.85, and 0.65 µs are realized. Under a certain frequency sweep chirp rate of 0.978 THz/s, the measurement errors are below ±12 and ±5 MHz by using one pair of pulses and multiple pairs of pulses, respectively. The influence of the frequency sweep chirp rate and pulse width on the measurement error has also been studied. To a certain extent, the faster the frequency sweep, the greater the frequency measurement error. For a specific frequency sweep chirp rate, the measurement error is almost unaffected by the pulse width to be measured.