Dynamic optical isolation with all-optical switching capability is in great demand in advanced optical communications and all-optical signal processing systems. Most conventional optical isolators rely on Faraday rotation and are realized using micro/nanofabrication techniques, but it is not always straightforward to incorporate magneto-optical crystals into these compact systems. Here, we report the experimental demonstration of a reconfigurable all-optical isolator based on optical excitation of a gigahertz guided acoustic mode in a micrometre-sized photonic crystal fibre core. This device has remarkable advantages over its passive counterparts, including a large dynamic range of isolation, fast switching capability and reversibility, which provide new functionality that is useful in various types of all-optical systems. Devices based on similar physical principles could also be realized in CMOS-compatible silicon on-chip platforms

A novel kind of nanostructured optical fiber, displaying an extremely high and optically broadband optomechanical nonlinearity, is presented. It comprises two closely spaced ultrathin glass membranes (webs) suspended in air and attached to the inner walls of a glass fiber capillary. Light guided in this dual-web structure can exert attractive or repulsive pressure on the webs, causing them to be pushed together or pulled apart. The elastic deflection of the webs is, in turn, coupled to the electromagnetic field distribution and results in a change in the effective refractive index within the fiber. Employing a pump-probe technique in an interferometric setup, optomechanically induced refractive index changes more than 10^{4} times larger than the Kerr effect are detected. Theoretical estimates of the optomechanical nonlinearity agree well with the experimental results. The dual-web fiber combines the sensitivity of a microoptomechanical device with the versatility of an optical fiber and could trigger new developments in the fields of nonlinear optics, optical metrology, and sensing.

It is interesting to pose the question: How best to design an optomechanical device, with no electronics, optical cavity, or laser gain, that will self-oscillate when pumped in a single pass with only a few mW of single-frequency laser power? One might begin with a mechanically resonant and highly compliant system offering very high optomechanical gain. Such a system, when pumped by single-frequency light, might self-oscillate at its resonant frequency. It is well-known, however, that this will occur only if the group velocity dispersion of the light is high enough so that phonons causing pump-to-Stokes conversion are sufficiently dissimilar to those causing pump-to-anti-Stokes conversion. Recently it was reported that two light-guiding membranes 20 μm wide, ∼500 nm thick and spaced by ∼500 nm, suspended inside a glass fiber capillary, oscillated spontaneously at its mechanical resonant frequency (∼6 MHz) when pumped with only a few mW of single-frequency light. This was surprising, since perfect Raman gain suppression would be expected. In detailed measurements, using an interferometric side-probing technique capable of resolving nanoweb movements as small as 10 pm, we map out the vibrations along the fiber and show that stimulated intermodal scattering to a higher-order optical mode frustrates gain suppression, permitting the structure to self-oscillate. A detailed theoretical analysis confirms this picture. This novel mechanism makes possible the design of single-pass optomechanical oscillators that require only a few mW of optical power, no electronics nor any optical resonator. The design could also be implemented in silicon or any other suitable material.

Recent experiments in the field of strong optomechanical interactions have focused on either structures that are simultaneously optically and mechanically resonant, or photonic crystal fibers pumped by a laser intensity modulated at a mechanical resonant frequency of the glass core. Here, we report continuous-wave (CW) pumped self-oscillations of a fiber nanostructure that is only mechanically resonant. Since the mechanism has close similarities to stimulated Raman scattering by molecules, it has been named stimulated Raman-like scattering. The structure consists of two submicrometer thick glass membranes (nanowebs), spaced by a few hundred nanometers and supported inside a 12-cm-long capillary fiber. It is driven into oscillation by a CW pump laser at powers as low as a few milliwatts. As the pump power is increased above threshold, a comb of Stokes and anti-Stokes lines is generated, spaced by the oscillator frequency of similar to 6 MHz. An unprecedentedly high Raman-like gain of similar to 4 x 10(6) m(-1) W-1 is inferred after analysis of the experimental data. Resonant frequencies as high as a few hundred megahertz are possible through the use of thicker and less-wide webs, suggesting that the structure can find application in passive mode-locking of fiber lasers, optical frequency metrology, and spectroscopy. (C) 2014 Optical Society of Americ

It is shown that optomechanical forces can cause nonlinear self-channelling of light in a planar dual-slab waveguide. A system of two parallel silica nanowebs, spaced ~100 nm and supported inside a fibre capillary, is studied theoretically and an iterative scheme developed to analyse its nonlinear optomechanical properties.Steady-state field distributions and mechanical deformation profiles are obtained, demonstrating that self-channelling is possible in realistic structures at launched powers as low as a few mW. The differential optical nonlinearity of the selfchannelled mode can be as much as ten million times higher than the corresponding electronic Kerr nonlinearity. It is also intrinsically broadband, does not utilize resonant effects, can be viewed as a consequence of the extreme nonlocality of the mechanical response, and in fact is a notable example of a so-called "accessible"soliton.