Intensity-only Detection and Decoding of Coherent Signals using a Photonics Spectrogram

Processing coherent communication signals in the optical domain using the Time-Lens Spectrogram, we demonstrate the decoding of a 1 Gbaud/s QAM 16 signal with pre-FEC BER 7.5x10^-3, using only a single photodetector and simple decision algorithm, without any coherent detection, local oscillator, or interferometric system.