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Optics Letters

Turning four-wave mixing on and off in elliptically birefringent fibers via narrow frequency detuning

Neel Choksi, Li Qian

Published Oct 21, 2024• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

Controlling four-wave mixing (FWM) is vital for several applications, including fiber optical communication, optical signal processing, optical amplification, and frequency generation. This paper presents a novel, to our knowledge, approach to control unidirectional FWM in elliptically birefringent fibers. By leveraging the frequency-dependent polarization eigenmodes of these fibers and detuning the optical frequency of one of the pump fields by a few megahertz, we can turn the FWM interaction on and off, thus controlling the generation of signal and idler fields. Moreover, this approach allows us to turn off the FWM interaction at any desired frequency, enabling all-optical switching and narrowband filtering applications.

DOI
10.1364/ol.542187

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Controlling four-wave mixing (FWM) is vital for several applications, including fiber optical communication, optical signal processing, optical amplification, and frequency generation. This paper presents a novel, to our knowledge, approach to control unidirectional FWM in elliptically birefringent fibers. By leveraging the frequency-dependent polarization eigenmodes of these fibers and detuning the optical frequency of one of the pump fields by a few megahertz, we can turn the FWM interaction on and off, thus controlling the generation of signal and idler fields. Moreover, this approach allows us to turn off the FWM interaction at any desired frequency, enabling all-optical switching and narrowband filtering applications.
Optical fibers have unwanted residual birefringence due to imperfections in fabrication processes and environmental conditions. This birefringence will randomize the state of polarization of propagating signals and may harm the performance of four-wave mixing based processing devices. Here, we present a quantitative study of the effects of birefringence in orthogonal-pump four-wave mixing systems, and identify different regions of operation of the optical fiber, mainly determined by the relative magnitude between the physical length L and beat length L b . This finding clarifies the characteristics of the complex interplay between birefringence and four-wave mixing and advises appropriate fiber length selection for minimized polarization dependent gain.
Polarization analysis of vectorial four-wave mixing (FWM) in birefringent photonic-crystal fibers reveals physically significant tendencies in the behavior of FWM sideband correlations as a function of fiber birefringence, dispersion, and nonlinearity, as well as the pump intensity and bandwidth. Scanning over this parameter space is shown to steer vectorial FWM from largely decoupled sideband generation by individual polarization modes of the pump to FWM scenarios enabling multipartite entanglement generation.
We investigate the possibilities of controlling and exploiting the spatial evolution of the four-wave mixing (FWM) idler in a fiber optical parametric amplifier, considering standard single-mode fibers. We found that the use of high pump powers, for a given requirement on the signal extinction ratio and frequency separation between pump and signal, can considerably affect the optical signal-to-noise ratio on the idler frequency due to the residual modulation. We observe that by choosing an opportune length of the fiber, the residual idler modulation can be suppressed or counteracted by an increase of optical average power. Thus, a proper choice of the transmission fiber length can considerably improve the remodulated idler characteristics.
A detailed analysis of four-wave mixing (FWM) and its required phase-matching conditions in graded-index multimode optical fibers is presented. The analysis is relevant mainly for spontaneous frequency conversion and photon pair generation via FWM, when the fiber length is of the order of a meter or shorter, and the signal and idler are generated at large frequency separations from the pump. An analytic expression for calculating the phase mismatch occurring as a result of the waveguide dispersion among the pump, signal, and idler beams is derived, and it agrees well with independent numerical analysis. This expression simplifies calculations considerably, as it allows the prediction of the wavelengths of the signal and idler by using only the mode group number of the spatial modes involved in the FWM process and the refractive index profile of the fiber. The scaling of the signal–pump–idler frequency separations with the mode group numbers is explored. The abundance of the configuration degeneracies of the FWM process in graded-index multimode fibers indicates that nearly identical signal and idler frequencies can be obtained for many different pump, signal, and idler spatial mode profile combinations.
Phase-sensitive amplification (PSA), which is produced by degenerate four-wave mixing (FWM) in a randomly-birefringent fiber, has the potential to improve the performance of optical communication systems. Scalar FWM, which is driven by parallel pumps, is impaired by the generation of pump-pump and pump-signal harmonics, which limit the level, and modify the phase sensitivity, of the signal gain. In contrast, vector FWM, which is driven by perpendicular pumps, is not impaired by the generation of harmonics. Vector FWM produces PSA with the classical properties of a one-mode squeezing transformation.