Laser-based optoelectronic generation of narrowband microwave chaos for radars and radio-communication scrambling

This Letter proposes an optoelectronic oscillator architecture for narrowband microwave chaos generation. In the time domain, the microwave signal features a slowly varying envelope with amplitude and phase chaos while, in the frequency domain, it is quasi-indistinguishable from a bandlimited white noise. A full theoretical analysis is performed to investigate the stability properties and route to chaos for the microwave oscillations. We experimentally generate the narrowband microwave chaos with a central frequency of 3 GHz and a bandwidth of only 16 MHz, and we discuss the applications for radar engineering and radiocommunication scrambling. (C) 2017 Optical Society of America