Potentialities of slow and fast light in optical fibers

Abstract

The ubiquitous role of optical fibers in modern photonic systems has stimulated research to realize slow and fast light devices directly in this close-to-perfect transmission line. Recent progress in developing optically-controlled delays in optical fibers, operating under normal environmental conditions and at telecommunications wavelengths, has paved the way towards real applications for slow and fast light. Advanced schemes can be realized thanks to the extremely flexible possibility to shape the gain spectrum to make it optimized for applications. Ultra wide bandwidth, delaying with flat amplitude response and lower distortion were successfully demonstrated this way.

Stimulated Brillouin scattering slow light in optical fibers [Invited]

“…In his review paper of 2008 [7], Thévenaz raised several open questions. One notable issue was the potential enhancement of light-matter interaction subject to slow light conditions.…”

“…Over the last decade, the photonics engineering community has been searching for ways to implement the principles of slow light in more practical media [2]. Slow light techniques employing standard fibers at room temperature have been drawing particular attention due to their potential incorporation in optical communication and microwave photonic systems [7,8]. The key performance metric of slow light demonstrations, with respect to potential applications, is the product of the achievable group delay variations times the bandwidth of pulses that are delayed without excessive distortion [9].…”

Analysis and Design of Single-Mode As2Se3-Chalcogenide Photonic Crystal Fiber for Generation of Slow Light With Tunable Features

“…If two optical waves have the frequency difference equal to the frequency of the acoustic wave, the interaction will efficiently lead to the formation of a dynamic Bragg grating in the core of a fiber which can diffract the light from the higher frequency wave back into the lower frequency wave. As a result the signal wave will experience a gain [40].…”

On-chip CMOS compatible reconfigurable optical delay line with separate carrier tuning for microwave photonic signal processing

“…Reconfigurable optical delay lines (ODL) and wideband tunable phase shifters have primary importance in a number of microwave photonic (MWP) signal processing applications like filtering [1][2][3][4], arbitrary waveform generation [5] or control of wideband phased-array antennas [6,7]. Various approaches have been proposed to implement reconfigurable true time delay (TTD) lines employing photonic crystals [8], semiconductor waveguides [9][10][11] or exploiting nonlinear effects in optical fibers, such as the stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) [12][13][14]. Moreover, cascaded optical ring resonators have also been considered to provide tunable time delay [15][16][17][18].…”