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Slow and Fast Light (SL)

Tunable slow-wave optical delay lines

Francesco Morichetti, Andrea Ivano Melloni, Cristina Canavesi, Filippo Persia, Mario Martinelli, Marc Sorel

Published Jan 1, 2006• 8 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Tunable delay lines exploiting slow-light in directly-coupled ring-resonators are presented. Time delay can be tuned from zero to maximum. Experimental results showing delays of 300ps and slowing factor of 7.5 over 3GHz bandwidth are reported.
DOI
10.1364/sl.2006.mb2

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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
As a potential enabling technology, slow light has captured much research interest over the past few years for achieving a continuously tunable optical delay line [1]. In principle, slow light is generated by tailoring an enhanced group-index resonance within a given nonlinear medium. This effective refractive index change is experienced by the data stream passing through and thus induces a controllable group delay onto the signal. Themain feature of a slow-light-based optical delay line is the capability for fine-grain temporal manipulation of optical pulses. This fine tunable delay element is envisioned to be useful for various high-bandwidth signal processing functions and applications.
All resonant systems throughout science and engineering, independent of their physical implementation have a bandwidth that is inversely related to the decay time. A similar relation exists in all slow-light systems, where the group index (and therefore the delay for a given footprint) is inversely related to the bandwidth. Therefore, resonant or slow-light systems can either store a broad signal for a short time, or a narrow signal for a long time, but cannot achieve large delay for broad bandwidth signals.Here we discuss our recent work on non-reciprocal optical systems that are not constrained by the delay-bandwidth limit. We show that large, broadband optical delay is not a pipe dream and is achievable with current optical technology. We discuss the underlying physics of delay and bandwidth in non-reciprocal optical systems and present an experimental implementation, based on a figure-9 cavity. We demonstrate a delay-bandwidth product 30 times above the seemingly fundamental time-bandwidth limit of traditional systems. Furthermore, we show that the optical pulse can be released after an arbitrary number of round trips, providing the control and tunability lacking from conventional spiral waveguide or fibre loop delay lines.
We experimentally demonstrate optically tunable delay line in a silicon microring resonator with a 20- m radius. The delay-tuning mechanism is based on the red shift of the resonance induced by thermal nonlinear effect. We investigate the delay performance of three modulation formats-non-return-to-zero (NRZ), return-to-zero (RZ), and differential phase-shift keying (DPSK) signals at different data rates. Tunable delay is achieved by controlling the power of the continuous-wave (CW) pump with very low tuning threshold, which could be used in microring-resonator-based slow-light structure.