A long optically controlled delay line enhanced by ring configuration is demonstrated by using the group-velocity control of signal pulses based on stimulated Brillouin scattering. In experiment, two optical fibre ring cavities are used: one is used as the Brillouin laser, providing single-mode Stokes wave as probe wave; the other is used as the Brillouin amplifier, working as slow light medium. We achieve a maximum time delay of 215 ns using the ring Brillouin amplifier, five times larger than the input probe pulse width of 40 ns. In the meantime, a considerable pulse broadening is observed, which agrees well with the theoretical prediction based on linear theory.
A long optically controlled delay line enhanced by ring configuration is demonstrated by using the group-velocity control of signal pulses based on stimulated Brillouin scattering. In experiment, two optical fibre ring cavities are used: one is used as the Brillouin laser, providing single-mode Stokes wave as probe wave; the other is used as the Brillouin amplifier, working as slow light medium. We achieve a maximum time delay of 215 ns using the ring Brillouin amplifier, five times larger than the input probe pulse width of 40 ns. In the meantime, a considerable pulse broadening is observed, which agrees well with the theoretical prediction based on linear theory.
We study numerically all-optical slow-light delays in room-temperature single-mode optical fibers induced by stimulated Brillouin scattering. We consider the propagation of a pulse through a cw-pumped Brillouin fiber amplifier, where the carrier frequency of the pulse is tuned near the Stokes resonance. Pulse delay and broadening of the Stokes pulse are studied in the small-signal and gain-saturation regimes. Pulse delay is shown to be limited by saturation of the Brillouin amplifier. In the small-signal regime, both time delay and pulse broadening increase with increasing gain. In the gain-saturation regime, both time delay and broadening decrease with increasing gain, and the pulse even achieves advancement. Time delay of more than one pulse-width is observed with modest pulse distortion, and over one pulse-width advancement can be obtained with larger pulse distortion in the gain-saturation regime.
Dynamic control of the speed of a light signal, based on stimulated Brillouin scattering in optical fibers, was theoretically studied and also experimentally demonstrated as the core object of this thesis. To date, slow light based on stimulated Brillouin scattering has shown the unmatched flexibility to offer an efficient timing tool for the development of all-optical future router. Nevertheless, the seeming perfect Brillouin slow light suffered from three major obstacles: naturally narrow signal bandwidth, strong change of signal amplitude, and significant signal distortion. The essential contribution of this work has been mostly dedicated to resolve all those impairments so as to make Brillouin slow light a completely operating all-optical delay line for practical applications. Actually, high capability of tailoring the spectral distribution of the effective Brillouin resonance makes possible to resolve partially or completely all those problems. First of all, a broadband spectral window was passively obtained in between two Brillouin gain/loss resonances by simply appending two segments of fibers showing different Brillouin frequency shifts. The global Brillouin gain of the concatenated fibers manifests a gain/loss doublet resonance showing a broad window in between gain/loss peaks. In practice, this configuration has a crucial advantage that it removes the need of the pump modulation, generally used to create a polychromatic pump source. Therefore, a broadband Brillouin slow and fast light was simple realized with a reduced distortion. Secondly, the signal amplification or attenuation associated to the signal delay was completely compensated by superposing Brillouin gain and loss resonances with identical depth but different width. As a result, the Brillouin gain led to effectively a spectral hole in the center of the broadband absorption and opened a transparent window while the sharp change in the refractive index was preserve. This way it makes possible to realize zero-gain Brillouin slow light. This configuration was also exploited to produce Brillouin fast light with a total absence of signal loss, simply by swapping the spectral position of the two pumps. At last, a signal was continuously delayed through a Brillouin fiber delay line without any distortion. Due to the strong induced dispersion, pulse broadening is a major difficulty in all slow light systems and it is impossible to compensate such broadening using a linear system. Therefore, a conventional Brillouin slow light system was combined with a nonlinear optical fiber loop mirror that gives a nonlinear quadratic transmission. Using this configuration, the inevitable pulse broadening was completely compensated at the output of the loop and a signal was delayed up to one symbol without any distortion. Brillouin slow light systems were further studied in the spectral domain. For a given Brillouin resonance the spectrum of a light pulse was optimized to better match the Brillouin bandwidth. When the time envelope of a pulse was properly shaped, it was clearly observed that the spectral width of the pulse became minimized while preserving the pulse duration. This way the maximum time delay through Brillouin slow light could be enhanced for a fixed pulse width. Brillouin fast light was even realized in total absence of any pump source, which is a plain requirement for the generation of Brillouin slow or fast light. This self-generated delay line, key contribution of this thesis, relies on both spontaneous and stimulated Brillouin scattering in optical fibers. In this implementation, a light signal was strongly boosted above the so-called Brillouin threshold, so that most power of the signal was transferred to a backward propagating wave, namely the generation of amplified spontaneous Stokes wave. Since the center frequency of the intense Stokes wave is below the signal frequency by exactly Brillouin shift of the fiber used, this wave led to a Brillouin loss band centered at the signal frequency. Consequently, the signal experienced fast light propagation and the propagation velocity of the signal was self-controlled, simply by varying the signal input power. This technique has many practical advantages such as its high simplicity of the configuration and an invariant signal power in the output of this delay line. Additionally, this system self-adapts the signal bandwidth as the spectrum of the amplified Stokes wave matches the spectral distribution of the signal. An alternative method to generate all-optical delay line was proposed instead of slow light. This scheme makes use of the combination of wavelength conversion and group velocity dispersion. This type of delay line was mainly aimed at improving the storage capability of delaying element. The wavelength of a signal was simply and efficiently converted at a desired wavelength using cross gain modulation in semiconductor optical amplifiers. Then the converted signal was delivered to a high dispersive medium and arrived at the end of the medium with relative time delay due to the group velocity dispersion. A fractional delay of 140 was continuously produced through this delay line for a signal with a duration of 100 ps, preserving signal bandwidth and wavelength. The effect of slow light on linear interactions between light and matter was experimentally investigated to clarify the current scientific argument regarding slow light-enhanced Beer-Lambert absorption. It was predicted that real slowing of the light group velocity could enhance the molecular linear absorptions so as to improve the sensitivity of this type of sensing. However, the experimental results unambiguously show that material slow light (slow light in traveling wave media) does not enhance the Beer-Lambert absorption.
Different Slow-light systems have been discussed and developed as a powerful tool to reduce the group velocity of optical signals during the last years. It has enjoyed much recent interest because of the potential system applications in optical telecommunication and information systems. Especially the nonlinear effect of stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) has become important for fiber based Slow-light systems. But, the SBS also has two challenges. First, the maximum time delay is limited due to the saturation of the Brillouin amplification process and second, the delay of the pulses is accompanied by pulse distortions (pulse shape broadening). For these aspects the shape of the Brillouin spectrum is of special interest. In this article a system is presented which allows the optimisation of the Brillouin spectrum. Simulations and first measurements show how the time delay can be enhanced with a simultaneous reduction of the pulse distortions.
The characteristics of the gain of Stokes pulses in single-mode optical fibres by stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) of monochromatic and nonmonochromatic pump signals have been investigated by numerical simulation using a spectral approach. Conditions under which ‘slow light’ (caused by a group delay) can be implemented are found (it is reasonable to apply this term to a process in which a pulse is delayed with conservation of its shape). The plane-wave interaction model is shown to describe adequately the dynamics of this process in single-mode fibres. A number of gain modes are investigated for Stokes pulses with different time structures upon monochromatic and nonmonochromatic excitation. A new data transfer technique is proposed, which is based on the conversion of stepwise phase modulation of the input Stokes signal into amplitude modulation of the output signal.
In this paper, we investigate slow light via stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) in a room temperature optical fiber that is pumped by a spectrally broadened laser. Broadening the spectrum of the pump field increases the linewidth Deltaomegapof the Stokes amplifying resonance, thereby increasing the slow-light bandwidth. One physical bandwidth limitation occurs when the linewidth becomes several times larger than the Brillouin frequency shift OmegaBso that the anti-Stokes absorbing resonance substantially cancels out the Stokes amplifying resonance and, hence, the slow-light effect. We find that partial overlap of the Stokes and anti-Stokes resonances can actually lead to an enhancement of the slow-light delay-bandwidth product when Deltaomegapsime1.3OmegaB. Using this general approach, we increase the Brillouin slow-light bandwidth to over 12 GHz from its nominal linewidth of ~30 MHz obtained for monochromatic pumping. We controllably delay 75-ps-long pulses by up to 47 ps and study the data-pattern dependence of the broadband SBS slow-light system
Slow light study is discussed in various methods of generation, materials and approaches. In this study, the control of group velocity, Vg and group velocity dispersion (GVD) of a pulse propagating in optical fiber is simulated and demonstrated. The slow light generation, which is closely related to Vg of a light pulse for this study is based on stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS), the most efficient approach as reported by previous researchers. By using Matlab R2011b software, the slow light generation is simulated for the slow light structure in the form of hollow conical shape resonator, focusing on the geometrical parameters. The simulation work is extended to the control of Vg and GVD, to investigate the influences of refractive index of the materials and wave number of the light pulses. While most of slow light researches neglect the effect of dispersion, this study explicitly includes the second term of the wave number’s expansion to represent GVD. Therefore, the experimental work investigates the creation of a strongly dispersive material with large chirp and small group delay via SBS in a highlynonlinear optical fiber as opposed to previous SBS experiments which mainly focus on the creation of a slow light material with minimum dispersion and chirp. To demonstrate the control of Vg and GVD, a two-frequency pump field which consists of two distributed feedback lasers with the relative frequency separation nearly twice the Brillouin frequency and a slow light medium in the form of a 2-km high nonlinear single mode optical fiber are employed. For input field with slowly varying amplitude, the experiment obtained output pulses with large GVD and decreased intensity. All-optical control of the GVD is demonstrated by measuring the linear frequency chirp impressed on a 28-nanosecond-duration optical pulse and it is tunable over the range of ± 7.8 ns2 m-1. In addition, the maximum observed value of GVD is 109 times larger than that obtained in a typical single-mode silica optical fiber. The simulation results for Gaussian pulses as input signal are in good agreement with the experimental ones, and therefore the control of Vg and GVD for different shapes of input pulses using the developed system can be predicted.