In slow light systems, increasing the delay-bandwidth product also increases distortion. We present a distortion metric that is directly related to data fidelity and can be used to design slow-light media under a bit-error-rate constraint.
Over the past few years, researchers have directed a significant amount of effort towards realizing tunable all-optical devices using nonlinear optical methods. It is now possible to exercise dynamic control of the group velocity of light traveling through a wide variety of material systems. The slow and fast light refer to situations in which the group velocity íg of an optical pulse through a dispersive material can be made to be smaller and larger, respectively, than the phase velocity vp = c/n. This ability could overcome the remaining challenge in current optical networks of storing and manipulating an optical signal directly in optical domain so as to avoid a bottleneck due to optical-to-electrical (O/E) and electrical-to-optical (E/O) conversions. The overall purpose of the dissertation is to study novel slow-light systems that provide controlled generation of large pulse delays relative to the pulse width with minimal pulse shape distortion by optimally design resonance profiles of such systems. The system design studies utilize several measures of performance such as the fractional delay, power throughput, and signal distortion under the limited system resource constraints. To this end, powerful data fidelity metrics are required to quantify the performance of tunable delay devices. Here, a new framework for measuring an information velocity and throughput is described and implemented using Shannon mutual information concepts. This new technique is used to investigate trends, trade-offs, and limits in slow light devices, which are physically sensible and in good agreement with analyses obtained using a conventional eye-opening(EO) metric. Using these information-theoretic and/or conventional metrics, we present the quantifying performance of gain-based stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) system in optical fibers as well as optical passive devices such as Fabry-Perot, fiber Bragg gratings, and ring resonators. It is shown that combining the SBS gain medium with these passive devices can compensate their respective disadvantages and thus increase delay performance without using additional resource of SBS pump power. The results show the possibility of achieving a fractional delay up to 10 at a signal bandwidth up to tens of GHz.
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.
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.