Letter abstract
Nature Physics 2, 388 - 392 (2006)
doi:10.1038/nphys315
Subject Categories: Optical physics | Electronics, photonics and device physics
Stimulated Brillouin scattering from multi-GHz-guided acoustic phonons in nanostructured photonic crystal fibres
P. Dainese1,2, P. St. J. Russell1,3, N. Joly1,3, J. C. Knight1, G. S. Wiederhecker2, H. L. Fragnito2, V. Laude4 and A. Khelif4
Wavelength-scale periodic microstructuring dramatically alters the optical properties of materials. An example is glass photonic crystal fibre1 (PCF), which guides light by means of a lattice of hollow micro/nanochannels running axially along its length. In this letter, we explore stimulated Brillouin scattering in PCFs with subwavelength-scale solid silica glass cores. The large refractive-index difference between air and glass allows much tighter confinement of light than is possible in all-solid single-mode glass optical fibres made using conventional techniques. When the silica-air PCF has a core diameter of around 70% of the vacuum wavelength of the launched laser light, we find that the spontaneous Brillouin signal develops a highly unusual multi-peaked spectrum with Stokes frequency shifts in the 10-GHz range. We attribute these peaks to several families of guided acoustic modes each with different proportions of longitudinal and shear strain, strongly localized to the core2, 3. At the same time, the threshold power for stimulated Brillouin scattering4 increases fivefold. The results show that Brillouin scattering is strongly affected by nanoscale microstructuring, opening new opportunities for controlling light—sound interactions in optical fibres.
- Photonics & Photonic Materials Group, Department of Physics, University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY, UK
- CePOF, Instituto de Física, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, 13.083-970 Campinas SP, Brazil
- Max-Planck Research Group (IOIP), University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Guenther-Scharowsky-Str., 1/Bau 24, 91058 Erlangen, Germany
- Département LPMO, Institut FEMTO-ST, 32 avenue de l'Observatoire, F-25044 Besançon cedex, France
Correspondence to: P. St. J. Russell1,3 e-mail: russell@optik.uni-erlangen.de
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