1.4 ps pedestal-free low timing jitter 10 GHz pulse source using commercial cascaded LiNbO3 modulators and fiber-based compressor.

A stable 10 GHz pedestal-free short pulse generation scheme consisting of cascaded commercial LiNbO(3) modulators has been proposed and successfully demonstrated experimentally. Fiber-based pulse compression and reshaping stages have been utilized to obtain a 1.38 ps optical pulse train with very little pedestal and 132 fs timing jitter. Excellent performance of multiplexing from 10 Gbits/s to 160 Gbits/s using this method indicates good potential for application in ultrahigh-speed optical time-division-multiplexing systems.