Open AccessBeating Nyquist with light: a compressively sampled photonic link
Author(s) -
Jonathan M. Nichols,
F. Bucholtz
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
optics express
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.394
H-Index - 271
ISSN - 1094-4087
DOI - 10.1364/oe.19.007339
Subject(s) - nyquist–shannon sampling theorem , nyquist frequency , nyquist rate , photonics , optics , computer science , signal (programming language) , sampling (signal processing) , limit (mathematics) , representation (politics) , signal processing , physics , electronic engineering , telecommunications , bandwidth (computing) , digital signal processing , mathematics , computer vision , computer hardware , engineering , mathematical analysis , detector , politics , law , political science , programming language
We report the successful demonstration of a compressively sampled photonic link. The system takes advantage of recent theoretical developments in compressive sampling to enable signal recovery beyond the Nyquist limit of the digitizer. This rather remarkable result requires that (1) the signal being recovered has a sparse (low-dimensional) representation and (2) the digitized samples be incoherent with this representation. We describe an all-photonic system architecture that meets these requirements and then show that 1 GHz harmonic signals can be faithfully reconstructed even when digitizing at 500 MS/s, well below the Nyquist rate.