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A microwave photonic short-time Fourier transform (STFT) system based on stabilized period-one (P1) nonlinear laser dynamics and stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) is proposed. By using an optoelectronic feedback loop, the frequency-sweep optical signal generated by the P1 nonlinear laser dynamics is stabilized, which is further used in conjunction with an optical bandpass filter implemented by stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) to achieve the frequency-to-time mapping of microwave signals and the final STFT. By comparing the experimental results with and without optoelectronic feedback, it is found that the time-frequency diagram of the signal under test (SUT) obtained by STFT is clearer and more regular, and the frequency of the SUT measured in each frequency-sweep period is more accurate. The mean absolute error is reduced by 50% under the optimal filter bandwidth., Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures

A photonics-assisted microwave pulse detection and frequency measurement scheme is proposed. The unknown microwave pulse is converted to the optical domain and then injected into a fiber loop for pulse replication, which makes it easier to identify the microwave pulse with large pulse repetition interval (PRI), whereas stimulated Brillouin scattering-based frequency-to-time mapping (FTTM) is utilized to measure the carrier frequency of the microwave pulse. A sweep optical carrier is generated and modulated by the unknown microwave pulse and a continuous-wave single-frequency reference, generating two different frequency sweep optical signals, which are combined and used as the probe wave to detect a fixed Brillouin gain spectrum. When the optical signal is detected in a photodetector, FTTM is realized and the frequency of the microwave pulse can be determined. An experiment is performed. For a fiber loop containing a 210-m fiber, pulse replication and FTTM of the pulses with a PRI of 20 {\mu}s and pulse width of 1.20, 1.00, 0.85, and 0.65 {\mu}s are realized. Under a certain sweep frequency chirp rate of 0.978 THz/s, the measurement errors are below {\pm}12 and {\pm}5 MHz by using one pair of pulses and multiple pairs of pulses, respectively. The influence of the sweep frequency chirp rate and pulse width on the measurement error has also been studied. To a certain extent, the faster the frequency sweep, the greater the frequency measurement error. For a specific sweep frequency chirp rate, the measurement error is almost unaffected by the pulse width to be measured., Comment: 13 pages, 8 figures

A photonic-assisted multi-functional radar system for simultaneous distance and velocity measurement and high-resolution microwave imaging is proposed and experimentally demonstrated by using a composite transmitted microwave signal of a single-chirped linearly frequency-modulated (LFM) signal and a single-tone microwave signal. In the system, the transmitted signal is generated via photonic frequency up-conversion based on a single integrated dual-polarization dual-parallel Mach-Zehnder modulator (DPol-DPMZM), whereas the echo signals scattered from the target are de-chirped to two low-frequency signals using a microwave photonic frequency mixer. By using the two low-frequency de-chirped signals, the real-time distance and radial velocity of the moving target can be measured accurately according to the round-trip time of the echo signal and its Doppler frequency shift. Compared with the previous reported distance and velocity measurement methods, where two LFM signals with opposite chirps are used, these parameters can be obtained using only a single-chirped LFM signal and a single-tone microwave signal. Meanwhile, high-resolution inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) imaging can also be realized using ISAR imaging algorithms. An experiment is performed to verify the proposed multi-functional microwave photonic radar system. An up-chirped LFM signal from 8.5 to 12.5 GHz and an 8.0 GHz single-tone microwave signal are used as the transmitted signal. The results show that the absolute measurement errors of distance and radial velocity are less than 5.9 cm and 2.8 cm/s, respectively. ISAR imaging results are also demonstrated, which proves the high-resolution and real-time ISAR imaging ability of the proposed system., Comment: 16 pages, 9 figures