Photonic chip based tunable and reconfigurable narrowband microwave photonic filter using stimulated Brillouin scattering

We report the first demonstration of a photonic chip based dynamically reconfigurablewidely tunablenarrow pass-bandhigh Q microwave photonic filter (MPF). We exploit stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) in a 6.5 cm long chalcogenide (As2S3) photonic chip to demonstrate a MPF that exhibited a high quality factor of ∼520 and narrow bandwidth and was dynamically reconfigurable and widely tunable. It maintained a stable 3 dB bandwidth of 23 ± 2MHz and amplitude of 20 ± 2 dB over a large frequency tuning range of 2-12 GHz. By tailoring the pump spectrumwe reconfigured the 3 dB bandwidth of the MPF from ∼20 MHz to ∼40 MHz and tuned the shape factor from 3.5 to 2 resulting in a nearly flat-topped filter profile. This demonstration represents a significant advance in integrated microwave photonics with potential applications in on-chip microwave signal processing for RADAR and analogue communications.