We experimentally demonstrate optical delay in the second-order Brillouin gain spectrum by incorporating a double Brillouin-frequency shifter into the system. By coinciding the seed signal with the second-order Brillouin gain spectrum, it was found that the seed signal experienced significantly larger delay as compared to the Brillouin slow light generated from the first-order Brillouin spectrum. At a Brillouin gain of 17 dB, the delay was found to be at maximum of 60 ns. This widens the window of promising opportunities into the deployment of all optical tunable delay into the existing optical signal processing.
We experimentally demonstrate optical delay in the second-order Brillouin gain spectrum by incorporating a double Brillouin-frequency shifter into the system. By coinciding the seed signal with the second-order Brillouin gain spectrum, it was found that the seed signal experienced significantly larger delay as compared to the Brillouin slow light generated from the first-order Brillouin spectrum. At a Brillouin gain of 17 dB, the delay was found to be at maximum of 60 ns. This widens the window of promising opportunities into the deployment of all optical tunable delay into the existing optical signal processing.
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.
Slow light is generated via the gain mechanisms of nonlinear optical phenomena-- stimulated stimulated Brillouin scattering in optical fiber. Slow light is characterized in terms of Brillouin threshold, gain spectrum, Brillouin frequency shift by using optical heterodyne detection. According to the measured Brillouin frequency shift, we set our signal frequency in the gain region by manual matching method to get the maximum gain, and the gain bandwidth is broadened to 450MHz using a phrase-modulated pump. A delay of 32ns is achieved for the 500ns input signal when the gain is 15dB.
Slow light is generated via the gain mechanisms of nonlinear optical phenomena-- stimulated stimulated Brillouin scattering in optical fiber. Slow light is characterized in terms of Brillouin threshold, gain spectrum, Brillouin frequency shift by using optical heterodyne detection. According to the measured Brillouin frequency shift, we set our signal frequency in the gain region by manual matching method to get the maximum gain, and the gain bandwidth is broadened to 450MHz using a phrase-modulated pump. A delay of 32ns is achieved for the 500ns input signal when the gain is 15dB.
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.
We investigate theoretically the delay performance of Brillouin slow light employing a broadband pump with a rectangular spectrum. Analytical expression of delayed Gaussian pulse amplitude is deduced with the second-order gain nonuniformity and the stimulated-Brillouin scattering-induced third-order dispersion effects involved. Calculated results show that the Gaussian pulse with full-width at half maximum of 200 ps is delayed by 80 ps with little pulse broadening in a single-stage Brillouin slow-light medium, and the time delay is extended to multi-hundred ps with low distortion in a cascaded Brillouin slow-light system. Comparing the analytical results with the numerical ones, we confirm that the pulse distortion is mainly attributed to the large third-order dispersion introduced by stimulated-Brillouin scattering.
We demonstrate a technique for generating tunable all-optical delays in room temperature single-mode optical fibers at telecommunication wavelengths using the stimulated Brillouin scattering process. This technique makes use of the rapid variation of the refractive index that occurs in the vicinity of the Brillouin gain feature. The wavelength at which the induced delay occurs is broadly tunable by controlling the wavelength of the laser pumping the process, and the magnitude of the delay can be tuned continuously by as much as 25 ns by adjusting the intensity of the pump field. The technique can be applied to pulses as short as 15 ns. This scheme represents an important first step towards implementing slow-light techniques for various applications including buffering in telecommunication systems.