Polarisation stability of optical solitons

Author

Hutchings, D.C. ; Arnold, J.M. ; Parker, D.F.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electron. & Electr. Eng., Glasgow Univ., UK

fYear

1999

fDate

1999

Firstpage

42461

Lastpage

42465

Abstract

Optical solitons are a topic of increasing importance with major applications in trans-oceanic communications (temporal solitons) and all-optical reconfigurable interconnects (spatial solitons). Initial investigations considered only single component solitons but research has advanced to considering the practicalities and problems of multi-component solitons. There are several possible implementations of this, including multiple wavelengths, but the most straightforward is based on the two orthogonal polarisation components. If the medium has a low birefringence then four-wave-mixing leads to an exchange of energy between the two components. We consider two examples of such systems employing a Kerr nonlinearity (1) temporal solitons in birefringent optical fibre and (2) spatial solitons in semiconductor slab waveguides

Keywords

optical solitons; Kerr nonlinearity; all-optical reconfigurable interconnects; birefringent optical fibre; four-wave-mixing; low birefringence; multi-component solitons; multiple wavelengths; optical solitons; orthogonal polarisation components; polarisation stability; semiconductor slab waveguides; single component solitons; spatial solitons; temporal soliton; trans-oceanic communications;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

iet

Conference_Titel

Optical Solitons (Ref. No. 1999/016), IEE Colloquium on

Conference_Location

London

Type

conf

DOI

10.1049/ic:19990060

Filename

773250