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Optics Letters

Analytical expression of pulse broadening in an arbitrary linear slow light medium

Miguel González‐Herráez, Sonia Martín‐López, Luc Thévenaz A

Published Jul 24, 2012• 6 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We derive an analytical expression for the broadening of a Gaussian input pulse in an arbitrary linear slow light medium. The expression consists of two terms, one corresponding to amplitude broadening (low-pass filtering of the pulse bandwidth) and another corresponding to phase broadening (phase dispersion around the resonance). It is shown that for a Lorentzian gain profile, the amplitude broadening is dominant at small fractional delays. However, for large fractional delays, phase broadening is inevitably dominate.

DOI
10.1364/ol.37.003171

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We derive an analytical expression for the broadening of a Gaussian input pulse in an arbitrary linear slow light medium. The expression consists of two terms, one corresponding to amplitude broadening (low-pass filtering of the pulse bandwidth) and another corresponding to phase broadening (phase dispersion around the resonance). It is shown that for a Lorentzian gain profile, the amplitude broadening is dominant at small fractional delays. However, for large fractional delays, phase broadening is inevitably dominate.
We study analytically pulse distortion in linear slow light systems, and provide some useful limits on these devices. Additionally, we also show that the contributions of phase and amplitude broadening can be de-coupled and quantified. It is observed that phase broadening is generally smaller than amplitude broadening in conventional slow light media (lorentzian gain profile) except for very large fractional delays, where it becomes larger. Upon these expressions, we may envisage new strategies to minimize the distortion in the delaying of pulses, depending on the specific application and the required fractional delay. To overcome the residual distortion, we show that nonlinear systems can lead to a resharpening of the pulses and a re-generation of the filtered frequencies.
We analytically study the linear propagation of arbitrarily shaped light pulses through an absorbing medium with a narrow transparency window or through a resonant amplifying medium. We point out that, under certain general conditions, the pulse acquires a nearly Gaussian shape, irrespective of its initial shape and of the spectral profile of the line. We explicitly derive in this case the pulse parameters, including its skewness, responsible for a deviation of the delay of the pulse maximum from the group delay. We illustrate our general results by analyzing the slow-light experiments having demonstrated the largest fractional pulse delays.
The dispersion experienced by a signal in a slow light system leads to a significant pulse broadening and sets a limit to the maximum delay actually achievable by the system. To overcome this limitation, a substantial research effort is currently being carried out, and successful strategies to reduce distortion in linear slow light systems have already been demonstrated. Recent theoretical and experimental works have even claimed the achievement of zero-broadening of pulses in these systems. In this work we obtain some physical limits to broadening compensation in linear slow light systems based on simple Fourier analysis. We show that gain and dispersion broadening can never compensate in such a system. Additionally, it is simply proven that all the linear slow light systems that introduce a low-pass filtering of the signal (a reduction in the signal root-mean- square spectral width), will always cause pulse broadening. These demonstrations are done using a rigorous shape-independent definition of pulse width (the root-mean-square temporal width) and arguments borrowed from time-frequency analysis.
Introduced the main reason of optical pulse spreading in the slow light medium.Assuming a chirped Gaussian input signal pulse,this paper deduced the analytical expression of the output-pulse amplitude envelope,the pulse delay and the broadening factor in the slow light system with a broadband and rectangular Brillouin spectrum under lossless medium and small signal gain approximation.The influence of pump bandwidth and other factors between pulse delay and chirp parameter has been quantitatively analyzed.Simulation results show that adding initial chirp in Gaussian pulse can reduce the pulse broadening.
To change the group velocity of optical signals has a lot of possible applications in telecommunications, sensing, nonlinear optics and so on. Especially the exploitation of the effect of stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) in optical fibers is of special interest since it just requires standard telecom equipment and low to moderate optical power. However, each delay in one single, low-gain SBS based slow-light system is accompanied by pulse broadening. This is a result of the inherent Kramers-Kronig relations between the gain, the phase-change and the accompanied group velocity. For an ideal flat gain the phase-change is non-ideal, and for an ideal phase-change the gain curve leads to a broadening. Furthermore, if the gain bandwidth is broadened in order to adapt it to the signal, the delay will be reduced. Thus, for one single low-gain slow-light system the broadening can be reduced by several methods but it cannot be zero. Here we will show how a zero-broadening SBS based slow-light system can be achieved by two different methods. The basic idea is a reshaping of the original pulse by an adapted gain in a second stage. This adaptation is achieved by the superposition of two Gaussian gain profiles or by a single saturated gain. As will be shown, these systems show an almost ideal over-all gain and phase function over the bandwidth of the pulses. Thus, SBS based slow-light with a delaybandwidth product of more than 1 bit and zero distortion is possible.
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.