[INVITED] Self-induced polarization tracking, tunneling effect and modal attraction in optical fiber

Abstract

In this paper, we report the observation and exploitation of the capability of light to self-organize its state-of-polarization, upon propagation in optical fibers, by means of a device called Omnipolarizer. The principle of operation of this system consists in a counter-propagating four-wave mixing interaction between an incident signal and its backward replica generated at the fiber output thanks to a reflective fiber loop. We have exploited this self-induced polarization tracking phenomenon for all-optical data processing and successfully demonstrated the spontaneous repolarization of a 40-Gbit/s On-Off keying optical signal without noticeable impairments. Moreover, the strong local coupling between the two counter-propagating waves has also revealed a fascinating aspect of the Omnipolarizer called polarization-based tunneling effect. This intrinsic property enables us to instantaneously let "jump" a polarization information onto the reflected signal, long before the expected time-of-flight induced by the round-trip along the fiber span. Finally, we discuss how the concept of self-organization could be generalized to multimode fibers, which paves the way to new important applications in the framework of spatial-mode-multiplexing.respectively, whereas s=S/|S| and j=J/|J| denote the corresponding unitary Stokes vectors which define the SOPs over the unit radius Poincaré sphere. The spatiotemporal dynamics of S and J in the fiber is ruled by the following coupled nonlinear partial differential equations [66]: J S J J J S J S S S α c α c z t z t

Magnetic-field effects on one-dimensional Anderson localization of light

“…Therefore, as soon as points on the Poincaré sphere are getting close to the poles, they diffuse less: the effect of the external magnetic field decreases. Note that this system therefore shows a manifestation of self-organization of the polarization state in an optical system [45,46].…”

Mode attraction, rejection and control in nonlinear multimode optics

“…Differently from single-mode waveguides, counter-propagating setups in multimode waveguides have been little addressed so far. The existence of mode attractors in a fibre supporting two spatial modes has been envisaged 34,38,39 . However, this process has been measured and quantified for the first time only recently in our work ref.…”