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Dispersionless slow light using gap solitons

Nature Physics volume 2, pages 775–780 (2006)Cite this article

Abstract

The ability to slow down and delay optical pulses is an intriguing physical phenomenon with significant applications, such as in telecommunications. It is essential for these applications that the phenomenon has enough bandwidth, so that it can respond sufficiently fast to the very short light pulses that will carry the information in future telecommunications systems. However, typical slow-light systems exhibit dispersion, which distorts the pulses on propagation, leading to loss of information, thereby limiting the bandwidth. This limitation imposes a trade-off between the acquired delay and the system’s bandwidth. By introducing nonlinearity, however, the pulse can travel slowly and also remain undistorted over arbitrarily long propagation lengths by the formation of a soliton. We observe such solitons in a fibre Bragg grating, and show that subnanosecond pulses travel at 16% of the speed of light, without broadening.

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Figure 1: Transmission spectrum of the 10 cm apodized FBG.
Figure 2: Schematic diagram of the experimental setup.
Figure 3: Nonlinear transmission.
Figure 4: Pulse and delay measurements.
Figure 5: Tunable delay with power or strain.
Figure 6: What to expect if longer FBGs are used.
Figure 7: Comparison of pulse quality between nonlinear and linear FBGs.

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Acknowledgements

This work was produced with the assistance of the Australian Research Council under the ARC Centres of Excellence programme.

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  1. ARC Centre of Excellence for Ultrahigh-Bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems (CUDOS), School of Physics, University of Sydney, New South Wales 2006, Australia

    Joe T. Mok, C. Martijn de Sterke, Ian C. M. Littler & Benjamin J. Eggleton

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Correspondence to Joe T. Mok.

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Mok, J., de Sterke, C., Littler, I. et al. Dispersionless slow light using gap solitons. Nature Phys 2, 775–780 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys438

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