Stability and Dynamics of Optical Waveguides, Lasers, and Amplifiers

摘要

We have completed basic theoretical studies of optical storage loops using solitons and phase-sensitive amplifiers (PSAs) and did detailed modeling of ongoing experiments performed in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Northwestern. The goal was to resolve the technical details associated with making a working storage device. We also performed studies of the dynamics and control of optical solitons in other situations, such as the effect of random birefringence on long-distance propagation and timing jitter in erbium-doped fiber lasers. In the later case, the configuration studied was one in which a mode-locked fiber laser is used as a clock recovery device; we derived theoretical estimates for the timing jitter reduction that can be obtained with this device. In the area of pulse propagation, we investigated work on polarization-mode dispersion and have examined the use of dispersion management to improve transmission performance. Such techniques have also been demonstrated to be useful in fiber lasers (in that context known as stretched-pulse mode- locking). In the area of wavelength conversion, we made several trips to the Air Force Research Laboratories in Dayton, 011 to discuss issues and research needs with the group there headed by Dr. Ken Schepler. It was determined that key issues that are needed to be supported are numerical and analytical modeling of optical parametric oscillators (OPO) that use quadratic crystals with periodic polling to quasi-phase-match conversion of the pump lasers.