Investigations of Laterally Coupled All Optical Switches and Detectors on Silica Fibers.

摘要

It is of interest to explore the possibility of fabricating active and passive device element such as switches, guides, couplers and detectors on or around single mode optical fibers. Such on-line detection and signal processing would be extremely useful for long-range fiber-optic communication. With this in mind, we have explored heterostructure and quantum well devices which can be laterally coupled to fibers, investigated the growth of GaAs and related materials on silica, fibers and sapphire by molecular beam epitaxy, and have demonstrated for the time the fabrication and performance of active optoelectronic devices on silica fibers. The lateral coupling of light of fibers into photodiodes has been characterized experimentally. Two novel heterostructure devices have been demonstrated. The first is a bipolar phototransistor with a staircase superlattice in the collector in which selective gain is achieved. The other is a photonic switching device made as a vertic directional coupler with a nonlinear MQW coupling medium. (RRH)