Measurement of modulation index and half-wave voltage of an electro-optical phase modulator with a dispersion-based phase filter

In this paper, a novel method based on the use of an optical phase filter is proposed to evaluate the modulation index, as well as the half-wave voltage of an optical phase modulator. When a phase modulated signal propagates along the length of a dispersive fiber, the fiber dispersion acts as an optical phase filter and spectrally alters the relative phasing of the phase modulated signal, causing the phase modulation to become intensity modulation, which allows the swept frequency measurement of phase modulators by using a vector network analyzer. The modulation index and half-wave voltage as a function of the modulation frequency are experimentally measured for a commercial phase modulator, which agree well with the results obtained using the widely accepted optical spectrum analysis method. The proposed method requires only a length of dispersive fiber and works without any small-signal approximation, which is applicable for different driving levels and operating wavelengths with the same setup.