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Optics Letters

Room-temperature spectral hole burning in an engineered inhomogeneously broadened resonance

Adrian A. Juarez, Ramon A. Vilaseca, Zhaoming Zhu, Daniel J. Gauthier

Published Oct 10, 2008• 6 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We observe spectral hole burning in a room-temperature optical fiber pumped by a spectrally broadened pump beam. This beam drives the stimulated Brillouin process, creating an inhomogeneously broadened resonance in the material whose shape can be engineered by tailoring the beam's spectrum. A monochromatic saturating beam "burns" a narrow spectral hole that is approximately 10(4) times narrower than the inhomogeneous width of the resonance. This research paves the way toward agile optical information processing and storage using standard telecommunication components.

DOI
10.1364/ol.33.002374

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We observe spectral hole burning in a room-temperature optical fiber pumped by a spectrally broadened pump beam. This beam drives the stimulated Brillouin process, creating an inhomogeneously broadened resonance in the material whose shape can be engineered by tailoring the beam's spectrum. A monochromatic saturating beam "burns" a narrow spectral hole that is approximately 10(4) times narrower than the inhomogeneous width of the resonance. This research paves the way toward agile optical information processing and storage using standard telecommunication components.
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We show theoretically that the spectral hole burning recently observed in Brillouin fiber amplifiers and generators can be interpreted without invoking an inhomogeneous broadening of the Brillouin line. By using the three-wave model of stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS), we first investigate the linear response of a Brillouin fiber amplifier to a weak amplitude modulation of the injected signal wave. The transfer functions that fully characterize this response are analytically calculated. The fact that they may exhibit a dip is shown to be due both to the gain saturation and to the coupling between the pump and signal perturbations that counterpropagate around the steady-state intensity profiles. These transfer functions also appropriately characterize the way through which noisy perturbations are filtered in SBS fiber generators. The spectral hole burning observed in generators is thus simply connected to spectral hole burning studied in SBS amplifiers.
One very exciting application of laser spectroscopy would be to use the high-resolution capabilities of today’s lasers and the phenomenon of persistent spectral hole-burning to form a frequency domain optical storage system.1 In such a system, bits of information would be stored by locally modifying (in the frequency domain) the shape of an inhomogeneously broadened absorption line of an absorber in a solid at low temperatures. Because typical homogeneous widths are 1000X (or more) narrower than typical inhomogeneous widths, as many as 1000 bits could be written in one diffraction-limited 1-μm spot In a sample, yielding the impressive storage density of 1011 bits/cm2.
Efforts to create materials in which to burn holes at higher temperatures face an inherent contradiction: the need for inhomogeneous line broadening from host-guest interactions, vs. the desire to limit the homogeneous line broadening from thermal fluctuations of host-guest interactions (i.e. phonon broadening). A different approach to the question of how to burn holes at high temperatures was recently conceived and experimentally confirmed.1 This approach relies on using distributions of chromophore-doped optical cavities as the hole burning medium. The effect was recently observed in dye-doped micro-spheres. As a simple model illustrating the important effects characteristic to these Mie theory cavity resonances in spheres, the Fabry-Perot is treated analytically and numerically in this work.
The use of persistent spectral hole burning in optical data storage allows an increase of the storage density up to a factor of 1000 compared to the common spatial matrix of optical bits.1 The information is stored by burning at low temperature a sequence of narrow spectral holes in the inhomogeneously broadened optical transition of optical centers, e.g. dye molecules embedded in an amorphous polymer, with a tunable narrow-bandwidth laser. One bit of information is encoded by the presence or absence of a hole at a given location in frequency space. The information is read by observing the absorption or the fluorescence of the storage material using a laser with tunable frequency. One of the problems of spectral hole burning data storage arises from the fact that for addressing the memory locations the laser frequency has to be changed over a large frequency range with high accuracy and speed.