text: ENS Cachan - Laboratoire de photonique quantique et moléculaire - Advances in opto-electronic oscillator operation for sensing and component characterization
  A 10h00 - Amphithéâtre Fonteneau (Bâtiment d'Alembert)
  The optoelectronic oscillator (OEO) was first introduced in 1996 by S. Yao and L. Maleki as a very low phase noise microwave oscillator working in direct synthesis. The OEO developments concern applications in microwave photonics, optical telecommunication, radar and high speed signal processing systems but it should also be used in the sensing domain. In this thesis, we study several aspects to apply the OEO to liquid refractive index measurement.
  Because of its structure the OEO is very dependent on the ambient conditions. If the OEO is not optimized and controlled, it cannot operate well for long duration. We have analyzed the influences of temperature on the electrooptic modulator (EOM) and the global OEO behavior. Temperature control can significantly reduce the drift phenomena of the EOM. In order to totally remove this drift, we have developed a complete digital system, based on a DSP kit, to detect and compensate automatically the EOM optical bias point drift and to control simultaneously its temperature. The first technique is based on a dither signal at low frequency, injected to DC electrode of the EOM. The second one is based on the average optical output power of the EOM. A combination of these two techniques can take advantages from both of them.
  Using like that the OEO, we have tested several configurations to measure the refractive index of four classical chemical solutions leading to a standard deviation of 3 per thousand. The results are in rather good agreement with previous publications. Finally, we have introduced a new method to improve the long-term refractive index measurement by monitoring, with a vector network analyzer, the variations of the optical delay in the fiber loop of the OEO. Introducing by this way a correction to the long-term frequency measurement it is possible to reduce the oscillation frequency fluctuations to only 606 Hz, compared to the 8 GHz of the oscillator, for a duration of 62 hours. Therefore the signal-to-noise ratio in the refractive index measurement can be enhanced and so the detection resolution of the refractive index variations during time.