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Optics and Photonics News

Coupled Resonator Optical Waveguides: Toward the Slowing and Storage of Light

Jacob Scheuer, George T. Paloczi, Joyce K. S. Poon, Amnon Yariv

Published Feb 1, 2005• 106 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The development of a simple, solid-state-based technology to slow the propagation of light could prove an important step in the realization of the high-bit-rate communication systems of the future. The use of coupled resonator optical waveguides (CROWs) as practical elements to slow and store light pulses is one possibility.
DOI
10.1364/opn.16.2.000036

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Two Speeds at Once

In the seemingly never-ending quest to speed up data transfer, light constitutes the ultimate communications carrier. However, the speed of light through a medium is generally constant, making photon storage and on-chip optical signal processing difficult tasks to implement. To slow things down, coupling microring resonators to an optical waveguide can effectively delay the propagation of photons. It has also been shown that the dispersion properties of these devices can distort the pulse profile so that the speed of light appears to be exceeded, providing so-called fast-light. From a practical viewpoint, it would be desirable to combine both of these properties in a single optical device. Recent work has found that these microring resonators are birefringent with respect to the polarization of the propagating light; i.e., one polarization simultaneously propagates faster than its orthogonal counterpart. From calculations, Fietz and Shvets show that by using light of mixed polarization and adjusting the mixing angle of that light and the number of microring resonators along the waveguide, a tunable delay time between polarized wave packets of incoming light should be readily achieved. — ISO

Science•Jan 3, 2008•1 citation
We introduce a mechanism to time reverse short optical pulses in coupled resonator optical waveguides (CROWs) by direct modulation of the coupling coefficients between microresonators. The coupling modulation is achieved using phase modulation of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer coupler. We demonstrate that by adiabatic modulation of the coupling between resonators we can time reverse or store light pulses with bandwidths up to a few hundred GHz. The large pulse bandwidths, small device footprint, robustness with respect to resonator losses, and easy tuning process of the coupling coefficients make this method more practical than previous proposals.
We propose a method of storage and reconstruction of a classical light pulse based on photorefractive holography in a coupled-resonator optical waveguide (CROW). Pulse propagation in a CROW is described in the context of the tight-binding approximation; the use of a CROW results in a large reduction of the group velocity, which is important for spatial compression of the optical pulses. Further, the efficiency of the photorefractive effect is enhanced in a CROW, enabling quasistatic holographic grating formation using much lower intensity optical pulses. We describe in detail the formation of a photorefractive index grating in a CROW via interference with a reference pulse and the subsequent holographic reconstruction of the signal pulse.
The possibility of dynamically controlling the speed of light can be extremely useful in all the optical applications where a variable delay is needed, such as bit and frame synchronization and optical storage. To this aim, coupled resonator slow-wave structures (SWSs) represent a promising approach to slow down the propagation of optical signals with as large bandwidths as required by optical communication systems. We show that by suitably setting the rings' resonances, SWSs can act efficiently as tunable delay lines, with the overall time delay being continuously adjustable from zero to a maximum value, typically limited by the effects of loss and dispersion. Every ring of the structure can be used as an optical gate and optical pulses can also be trapped and released by the SWS, so as to realize an optical memory or buffer. A time delay of 300 ps and a slowing ratio of 7.5 over a 3.3 GHz bandwidth are experimentally demonstrated in SWSs realized in silicon oxynitride technology
In the first paper of our series of articles on photon transmission in the coupled resonator optical waveguide (CROW), we used the two time Green function approach to study the physical mechanism for the coherent control by doping two-level atoms. In present paper, we propose and study a hybrid mechanism for photon transmission in the CROW by incorporating the electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) effect in the doping artificial atoms and the band structure of the CROW. Here, the configuration setup of system, similar to that in the first paper, consists of a CROW with homogeneous couplings and the artificial atoms with Lambda\\LambdaLambda-type three levels doped in each cavity. Unlike the stimulated Raman process used in the first paper to reduce the three level systems into the two level ones, the roles of three levels are completely considered based on a kind of mean field approach where the collection of three-level atoms collectively behave as two-mode spin waves. Then the total system is reduced into an exactly solvable coupling boson model. We show that the light pulses can be stopped and stored coherently by controlling the classical field.
In the seemingly never-ending quest to speed up data transfer, light constitutes the ultimate communications carrier. However, the speed of light through a medium is generally constant, making photon storage and on-chip optical signal processing difficult tasks to implement. To slow things down, coupling microring resonators to an optical waveguide can effectively delay the propagation of photons. It has also been shown that the dispersion properties of these devices can distort the pulse profile so that the speed of light appears to be exceeded, providing so-called fast-light. From a practical viewpoint, it would be desirable to combine both of these properties in a single optical device. Recent work has found that these microring resonators are birefringent with respect to the polarization of the propagating light; i.e., one polarization simultaneously propagates faster than its orthogonal counterpart. From calculations, Fietz and Shvets show that by using light of mixed polarization and adjusting the mixing angle of that light and the number of microring resonators along the waveguide, a tunable delay time between polarized wave packets of incoming light should be readily achieved. — ISO