Soft Glass Equiangular Spiral Photonic Crystal Fiber for Supercontinuum Generation

An equiangular spiral photonic crystal fiber (ES-PCF) design in soft glass is presented that has high nonlinearity ( gamma > 5250 W-1 middot km-1 at 1064 nm and gamma > 2150 W-1 middot km-1 at 1550 nm) with a low and flat dispersion (D ~ 0.8 ps/kmmiddotnm and dispersion slope ~ -0.7 ps/km middot nm2 at 1060 nm). The design inspired by nature is characterized by a full-vectorial finite element method. The ES-PCF presented improves over the mode confinement of triangular core designs and dispersion control of conventional hexagonal PCF, combining the advantages of both designs; it can be an excellent candidate for generating supercontinuum pumped at 1.06 mum

Mode degeneration in bent photonic crystal fiber study by using the finite element method

The development of highly dispersive lower and higher order cladding modes and their degeneration with respect to the fundamental core mode in a bent photonic crystal fiber is rigorously studied by use of the full-vectorial finite element method. It is shown that changes in the bending radius can modify the modal properties of large-area photonic crystal fibers, important for a number of potential practical applications

Mid-Infrared nonlinear silicon photonics

Recently there has been a growing interest in mid-infrared (mid-IR) photonic technology with a wavelength of operation approximately from 2-14 mu m. Among several established mid-IR photonic platforms, silicon nanophotonic platform could potentially offer ultra-compact, and monolithically integrated mid-IR photonic devices and device arrays, which could have board impact in the mid-IR technology, such as molecular spectroscopy, and imaging. At room temperature, silicon has a bandgap similar to 1.12 eV resulting in vanishing two-photon absorption (TPA) for mid-IR wavelengths beyond 2.2 mu m, which, coupled with silicon's large nonlinear index of refraction and its strong waveguide optical confinement, enables efficient nonlinear processes in the mid-IR. By taking advantage of these nonlinear processes and judicious dispersion engineering in silicon waveguides, we have recently demonstrated a handful of silicon mid-IR nonlinear components, including optical parametric amplifiers (OPA), broadband sources, and a wavelength translator. Silicon nanophotonic waveguide's anomalous dispersion design, providing four-wave-mixing (FWM) phase-matching, has enabled the first demonstration of silicon mid-IR optical parametric amplifier (OPA) with a net off-chip gain exceeding 13 dB. In addition, reduction of propagation losses and balanced second and fourth order waveguide dispersion design led to an OPA with an extremely broadband gain spectrum from 1.9-2.5 mu m and > 50 dB parametric gain, upon which several novel silicon mid-IR light sources were built, including a mid-IR optical parametric oscillator, and a supercontinuum source. Finally, a mid-IR wavelength translation device, capable of translating signals near 2.4 mu m to the telecom-band near 1.6 mu m with simultaneous 19 dB gain, was demonstrated