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Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE

Designing optimal gain profiles for slow-light applications

Ravi Pant, Michael D. Stenner, Mark Allen Neifeld

Published Feb 8, 2007• 4 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We present the methodology for designing the optimal gain profiles for slow-light systems under the given system constraints. Optimal system designs for the multiple Lorentzian gain lines make the gain spectrum uniform over larger bandwidth compared to the single-line gain system. The design procedure for the multiple-line gain systems is modified to make the gain spectrum uniform over arbitrarily broad bandwidth and applied to the design of the gain-only and gain+absorption slow-light media. The optimization of the triple-line gain system improves the delay-bandwidth product 1.7 times the delay-bandwidth product for the single-line gain system. For the broadband slow-light system, the optimal gain + absorption design and the optimal gain-only design improve the fractional delay performance by factors of 1.8 and 1.4, respectively, compared to the Gaussian noise pump broadened (GNPB) system.

DOI
10.1117/12.716468

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We present the methodology for designing the optimal gain profiles for slow-light systems under the given system constraints. Optimal system designs for the multiple Lorentzian gain lines make the gain spectrum uniform over larger bandwidth compared to the single-line gain system. The design procedure for the multiple-line gain systems is modified to make the gain spectrum uniform over arbitrarily broad bandwidth and applied to the design of the gain-only and gain+absorption slow-light media. The optimization of the triple-line gain system improves the delay-bandwidth product 1.7 times the delay-bandwidth product for the single-line gain system. For the broadband slow-light system, the optimal gain + absorption design and the optimal gain-only design improve the fractional delay performance by factors of 1.8 and 1.4, respectively, compared to the Gaussian noise pump broadened (GNPB) system.
We describe a methodology for designing the optimal gain profiles for gain-based, tunable, broadband, slow-light pulse delay devices based on stimulated Brillouin scattering. Optimal gain profiles are obtained under system constraints such as distortion, total pump power, and maximum gain. The delay performance of three candidate systems: Gaussian noise pump broadened (GNPB), optimal gain-only, and optimal gain+absorption are studied using Gaussian and super-Gaussian pulses. For the same pulse bandwidth, we find that the optimal gain+absorption medium improves the delay performance by 2.1 times the GNPB medium delay and 1.3 times the optimal gain-only medium delay for Gaussian pulses. For the super-Gaussian pulses the optimal gain-only medium provides a fractional pulse delay 1.8 times the GNPB medium delay.
We present a data-fidelity metric for quantifying distortion in slow-light optical pulse delay devices. We demonstrate the utility of this metric by applying it to the performance optimization of gain-based slow-light delay systems for Gaussian and super-Gaussian pulses. Symmetric Lorentzian double-line and triple-line gain systems are optimized and achieve maximum delay of 1.5 and 1.7 times the single-line gain system delay, respectively. The resulting double-line gain system design is qualitatively similar to the double-line gain system designed with a previous metric, but is tuned specifically to constrain data fidelity.
A slow-light medium based on multiple, closely spaced gain lines is studied. The spacings and relative strengths of the gain lines are optimized by using the criteria of gain penalty and eye-opening penalty to maximize the fractional delay defined in terms of the best decision time for random pulse trains. Both numerical calculations and experiments show that an optimal design of a triple-gain-line medium can achieve a maximal fractional delay about twice that which can be obtained with a single-gain-line medium, at three times higher modulation bandwidth, while high data fidelity is still maintained.
We describe a methodology to maximize slow-light pulse delay subject to a constraint on the allowable pulse distortion. We show that optimizing over a larger number of physical variables can increase the distortion-constrained delay. We demonstrate these concepts by comparing the optimum slow-light pulse delay achievable using a single Lorentzian gain line with that achievable using a pair of closely-spaced gain lines. We predict that distortion management using a gain doublet can provide approximately a factor of 2 increase in slow-light pulse delay as compared with the optimum single-line delay. Experimental results employing Brillouin gain in optical fiber confirm our theoretical predictions.
High-speed optical networks will require all-optical signalprocessing to avoid bottleneck due to optical-to-electrical (O/E)and electrical-to-optical (E/O) conversion. Enabling of opticalprocessing tasks such as optical buffering and data synchronizationwill require large tunable delay. Recently, slow-light physics gotwide attention to generate tunable delay. However, for a slow-lightsystem large delay comes at the expense of increased distortion.This dissertation presents a study of the slow-light systems andquantifies the limitations imposed on delay due to distortion andsystem resource constraints. Optimal designs for two- and three-lineBrillouin slow-light systems showed fractional pulse delay of up to1.7 compared to a single-line gain system. Optimal designs forbroadband Brillouin gain system showed upto 100\% delay improvementcompared to the Gaussian pump. Wavelength conversion and dispersionbased tunable delay systems showed bit delay of 15 bits. An opticalbuffer based on photorefractive medium for real-time data storagewas demonstrated by storing and retrieving a 7-bit data sequence.
We present a method to achieve flat-top gain spectrum through overlapping multiple gain lines, which can be used to increase slow light bandwidth and relative pulse delay. A tunable gain bandwidth can be realized by changing the number of spectral lines and frequency separation between adjacent spectral lines. We demonstrate the method in a SBS-based slow light system. A phase modulator is used to modulate the phase of the pump wave, generating a pump wave with multi-line spectrum and achieving a Brillouin gain bandwidth of ~ 330 MHz.