Phase and amplitude measurements for high bandwidth optical signals

• We propose a simple and inexpensive method to measure phase and optical power of pulses in the tens of ps range.
• We simulate the response for Gaussian and Hyperbolic secant pulses affected by SPM, second and third order dispersion.
• We analyze the performance of the method and the error depending of the system parameters.
• We propose two optical systems for the future implementation.

In this paper a novel technique for obtaining the amplitude and phase of optical pulses with time extents as short as tens of ps is presented. The method which is based on the transport-of-intensity equation only requires, for a practical realization, of passive fiber optic devices. It employs as the main component a dispersive element with a known second order dispersion coefficient. Two different setup implementations are considered, for which simulations are carried out in order to test the method performance taking into account both, realizable models of the involved devices and typical pulses found in optical transmission systems. The characterization of optical pulses affected by dispersion and nonlinear effects, such as self-phase modulation, is used to evaluate the performance of the method and show the practical feasibility of the future implementation.