Chromatic Dispersion Measurement Using Direct Instantaneous Frequency Measurement

A new chromatic dispersion measurement technique is presented. The group delay of the device under test is directly obtained from the instantaneous frequency of a short optical pulse after propagation in the device, itself accurately measured by interfering the dispersed pulse with itself and measuring the resulting temporal and spectral interferograms. Temporal and spectral fringe-encoding provides excellent accuracy and robustness to noise, so that a wide variety of dispersions can be characterized, even at high insertion losses.