Douglas Bulla

Long, low loss etched As(2)S(3) chalcogenide waveguides for all-optical signal regeneration.

We report on the fabrication and optical properties of etched highly nonlinear As(2)S(3) chalcogenide planar rib waveguides with lengths up to 22.5 cm and optical losses as low as 0.05 dB/cm at 1550 nm - the lowest ever reported. We demonstrate strong spectral broadening of 1.2 ps pulses, in good agreement with simulations, and find that the ratio of nonlinearity and dispersion linearizes the pulse chirp, reducing the spectral oscillations caused by self-phase modulation alone. When combined with a spectrally offset band-pass filter, this gives rise to a nonlinear transfer function suitable for all-optical regeneration of high data rate signals.

Applications of Highly-Nonlinear Chalcogenide Glass Devices Tailored for High-Speed All-Optical Signal Processing

Ultrahigh nonlinear tapered fiber and planar rib Chalcogenide waveguides have been developed to enable highspeed all-optical signal processing in compact, low-loss optical devices through the use of four-wave mixing (FWM) and cross-phase modulation (XPM) via the ultra fast Kerr effect. Tapering a commercial As2Se3 fiber is shown to reduce its effective core area and enhance the Kerr nonlinearity thereby enabling XPM wavelength conversion of a 40 Gb/s signal in a shorter 16-cm length device that allows a broader wavelength tuning range due to its smaller net chromatic dispersion. Progress toward photonic chip-scale devices is shown by fabricating As2S3 planar rib waveguides exhibiting nonlinearity up to 2080 W-1ldr km-1 and losses as low as 0.05 dB/cm. The materials high refractive index, ensuring more robust confinement of the optical mode, permits a more compact serpentine-shaped rib waveguide of 22.5 cm length on a 7-cm- size chip, which is successfully applied to broadband wavelength conversion of 40-80 Gb/s signals by XPM. A shorter 5-cm length planar waveguide proves most effective for all-optical time-division demultiplexing of a 160 Gb/s signal by FWM and analysis shows its length is near optimum for maximizing FWM in consideration of its dispersion and loss.

Progress in optical waveguides fabricated from chalcogenide glasses

We review the fabrication processes and properties of waveguides that have been made from chalcogenide glasses including highly nonlinear waveguides developed for all-optical processing.

Local tuning of photonic crystal cavities using chalcogenide glasses

We developed a method to locally tune refractive index in photonic crystals. The technique, based on photodarkening of chalcogenide glasses, enables 3 nm resonance tuning of GaAs photonic crystal cavities operating at 940 nm.

Photonic chip based transmitter optimization and receiver demultiplexing of a 1.28 Tbit/s OTDM signal

We demonstrate chip-based Tbaud optical signal processing for all-optical performance monitoring, switching and demultiplexing based on the instantaneous Kerr nonlinearity in a dispersion-engineered As(2)S(3) planar waveguide. At the Tbaud transmitter, we use a THz bandwidth radio-frequency spectrum analyzer to perform all-optical performance monitoring and to optimize the optical time division multiplexing stages as well as mitigate impairments, for example, dispersion. At the Tbaud receiver, we demonstrate error-free demultiplexing of a 1.28 Tbit/s single wavelength, return-to-zero signal to 10 Gbit/s via four-wave mixing with negligible system penalty (< 0.5 dB). Excellent performance, including high four-wave mixing conversion efficiency and no indication of an error-floor, was achieved. Our results establish the feasibility of Tbaud signal processing using compact nonlinear planar waveguides for Tbit/s Ethernet applications.

Wavelength Conversion of High-Speed Phase and Intensity Modulated Signals Using a Highly Nonlinear Chalcogenide Glass Chip

We report all-optical wavelength conversion of high-speed differential phase-shift keyed (DPSK) and on-off keyed (OOK) signals using the nonlinear Kerr-effect in an optical chip. This was enabled by four-wave mixing (FWM) of the signal with a continuous-wave (CW) pump laser in a 7-cm-long dispersion-shifted planar rib waveguide in highly nonlinear As2S3 glass. Both conversion of 40-Gb/s DPSK and 160-Gb/s OOK signals by 33 and 15 nm, respectively, are shown. These are first demonstrations of signal processing by CW-pumped FWM in a chalcogenide waveguide, highlighting its capability to perform phase-preserving operations at high bit rates in chip-scale devices.

Submicrometer-Thick Low-Loss As

We describe a fabrication process for and the characterization of submicrometer-thick As2S3 waveguides. Poly(methylmethacrylate) and bottom antireflective coating were employed as thin protective layers prior to photoresist patterning in order to prevent the attack of the As2S3 film by an alkaline developer. Propagation losses of ~0.2 and 0.6 dB/cm were measured for 4- and 2-¿m-wide waveguides fabricated from 0.85-¿m-thick films. Slightly higher loss in the transverse-magnetic mode may be the result of surface scattering of the rougher etched sidewalls.

_2

We report the first demonstration of simultaneous multi-impairment monitoring at ultrahigh bitrates using a THz bandwidth photonic-chip-based radio-frequency (RF) spectrum analyzer. Our approach employs a 7 cm long, highly nonlinear (gamma approximately 9900 /W/km), dispersion engineered chalcogenide planar waveguide to capture the RF spectrum of an ultrafast 640 Gb/s signal, based on cross-phase modulation, from which we numerically retrieve the autocorrelation waveform. The relationship between the retrieved autocorrelation trace and signal impairments is exploited to simultaneously monitor dispersion, in-band optical signal to noise ratio (OSNR) and timing jitter from a single measurement. This novel approach also offers very high OSNR measurement dynamic range (> 30 dB) and is scalable to terabit data rates.

S

We have fabricated 630 × 500 nm nanowires from Ge(11.5)As(24)Se(64.5) chalcogenide glass by electron beam lithography (EBL) and inductively coupled plasma (ICP) etching. The loss of the nanowire was measured to be 2.6 dB/cm for the fundamental TM mode. The nonlinear coefficient (γ) was determined to be ≈136 ± 7 W(-1)m(-1) at 1550 nm by both CW four-wave-mixing (FWM) and modeling. Supercontinuum (SC) was produced in an 18 mm long nanowire pumped by 1 ps pulses with peak power of 25 W.

_3

We present the first demonstration of an optical sampling system, using the optical Kerr effect in a chip-scale device, enabling combined capability for femtosecond resolution and broadband signal wavelength tunability. A temporal resolution <500 fs is achieved using four-wave mixing in a 7-cm-short chalcogenide planar waveguide. The use of a short length, dispersion-shifted waveguide with ultrahigh nonlinearity (104 W-1·km-1) enables high-resolution optical sampling without the detrimental effect of chromatic dispersion on the temporal distortion of the signal and sampling pulses, as well as their phase mismatch. Using the device, we successfully monitor a 640-Gb/s optical time-division multiplexing (OTDM) datastream, showcasing its potential for integrated chip-based monitoring of signals at bitrates approaching and beyond Tb/s. We discuss fundamental limitations and potential improvements.