Programmable passive Talbot optical waveform amplifier.

We introduce and experimentally demonstrate a new design for passive Talbot amplification of repetitive optical waveforms, in which the gain factor can be electrically reconfigurable. The amplifier setup is composed of an electro-optic phase modulator followed by an optical dispersive medium. In contrast to conventional Talbot amplification, here we achieve different amplification factors by using combinations of fixed dispersion and programmable temporal phase modulation. To validate the new design, we experimentally show tunable, passive amplification of picosecond optical pulses with gain factors from m = 2 to 30 using a fixed dispersive line (a linearly chirped fiber Bragg grating).