Tunable optical comb generation based on carrier-suppressed inte...

An approach to generate a flat optical comb with tunable comb spacing and adjustable comb number is proposed. In the proposed approach, a Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM), being biased to generate two carrier-suppressed first-order sidebands, is cascaded with a phase modulator. The two optical sidebands are then sent to the phase modulator to generate two identical, but frequency-shifted phase-modulated spectra. Thanks to the complementary nature of the two adjacent comb lines in the phase-modulated