Control of group velocity dispersion in single mode fiber based on stimulated Brillouin scattering

Abstract

Slow light study is discussed in various methods of generation, materials and approaches. In this study, the control of group velocity, Vg and group velocity dispersion (GVD) of a pulse propagating in optical fiber is simulated and demonstrated. The slow light generation, which is closely related to Vg of a light pulse for this study is based on stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS), the most efficient approach as reported by previous researchers. By using Matlab R2011b software, the slow light generation is simulated for the slow light structure in the form of hollow conical shape resonator, focusing on the geometrical parameters. The simulation work is extended to the control of Vg and GVD, to investigate the influences of refractive index of the materials and wave number of the light pulses. While most of slow light researches neglect the effect of dispersion, this study explicitly includes the second term of the wave number’s expansion to represent GVD. Therefore, the experimental work investigates the creation of a strongly dispersive material with large chirp and small group delay via SBS in a highlynonlinear optical fiber as opposed to previous SBS experiments which mainly focus on the creation of a slow light material with minimum dispersion and chirp. To demonstrate the control of Vg and GVD, a two-frequency pump field which consists of two distributed feedback lasers with the relative frequency separation nearly twice the Brillouin frequency and a slow light medium in the form of a 2-km high nonlinear single mode optical fiber are employed. For input field with slowly varying amplitude, the experiment obtained output pulses with large GVD and decreased intensity. All-optical control of the GVD is demonstrated by measuring the linear frequency chirp impressed on a 28-nanosecond-duration optical pulse and it is tunable over the range of ± 7.8 ns2 m-1. In addition, the maximum observed value of GVD is 109 times larger than that obtained in a typical single-mode silica optical fiber. The simulation results for Gaussian pulses as input signal are in good agreement with the experimental ones, and therefore the control of Vg and GVD for different shapes of input pulses using the developed system can be predicted.