Agenda

Technological advances in the fields of photonics and microwave offer today a marvelous playground for exploiting numerous physics effects in concrete applications. As far as laser sources are considered, many effects such as two photon absorption, nonlinear optical conversion, Brillouin scattering, or Auger lifetime reduction, are most often considered as detrimental effects which have to be avoided. We wish to show here that these effects can be advantageously turned into simple solutions to specific problems provided that they are implemented in a controlled manner within microwave photonics architectures. We will illustrate this assertion on different practical examples seeking at realizing single or dual-frequency noiseless optical sources that are self-regulated either in terms of intensity noise or frequency noise. Such coherent sources are increasingly required for numerous applications, including, e.g., long-range sensing, microwave photonics, lidar, high resolution spectroscopy, coherent communications, interferometry, and also in most modern physics experiments among which gravitational-wave detection, atomic clocks and time-frequency metrology.