Effects of Birefringence and Nonlinearity on Optical Pulse Propagation in New Types of Optical Fibers

The purpose of this grant was to allow us to complete work that we had already begun on spun optical fibers and to begin studies of holey and photonic crystal optical fibers. The work on spun optical fibers was completed with great success. It led to several publications in collaboration with our co-workers at the Universita di Padova, and the student who carried out this work received a major award from the Universita di Padova. The work on holey and photonic crystal fibers has proceeded more slowly, but, in collaboration with Korean co-workers at the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, we have developed three different computational models that allow us to calculate the modes of these fibers: a Galerkin model, a plane wave model, and a multipole model. We have applied these models to the study of mode coupling in periodic gratings. In collaboration with scientists at the Naval Research Laboratory, we have also applied these models to the study of pulse compression in tapered fibers and the development of nonlinear fibers that are capable of handling large powers in high-index and chalcogenide glasses. European and Asian countries have made large investments in the development of these new glass technologies, while the United States has not. As a consequence, the United States is falling behind in what we believe will prove to be a critical area of nanotechnology. It is our view that by investing in this project, the Department of Energy has helped lay the groundwork for future development of special fiber technology in the United States, once the decision has been made that the United States cannot continue to stand on the sidelines as this technology--which appears to have great commercial and military value--is developed elsewhere

Optical limiting in solid-core photonic crystal fibers

Optical limiting in solid-core photonic crystal fibers filled with reverse-saturable absorbers has been observed. A sharp change in limiting threshold was found for materials in the fiber holes with refractive indices near n = 1.44

A comprehensive model of gain recovery due to unipolar electron transport after a short optical pulse in quantum cascade lasers

We have developed a comprehensive model of gain recovery due to unipolar electron transport after a short optical pulse in quantum cascade lasers (QCLs) that takes into account all the participating energy levels, including the continuum, in a device. This work takes into account the incoherent scattering of electrons from one energy level to another and quantum coherent tunneling from an injector level to an active region level or vice versa. In contrast to the prior work that only considered transitions to and from a limited number of bound levels, this work include transitions between all bound levels and between the bound energy levels and the continuum. We simulated an experiment of S. Liu et al., in which 438-pJ femtosecond optical pulses at the device’s lasing wavelength were injected into an In0:653Ga0:348As=In0:310Al0:690As QCL structure; we found that approximately 1% of the electrons in the bound energy levels will be excited into the continuum by a pulse and that the probability that these electrons will be scattered back into bound energy levels is negligible, 104. The gain recovery that is predicted is not consistent with the experiments, indicating that one or more phenomena besides unipolar electron transport in response to a short optical pulse play an important role in the observed gain recovery