The decay of higher order solitons in optical fiber, initiated by localized channel perturbations such as a step change in dispersion, a localized loss element, or a bandpass filter, is explored theoretically and experimentally as a means of generating pairs of pulses having wavelengths that are up and down-shifted from the input wavelength. The achievable wavelength separation between the two sub pulses increases with increasing the amount of perturbations. Pulse parameter requirements for achieving useful wavelength shifts while avoiding unwanted nonlinear effects are presented. Experimental studies for N=2 solitons having 1 ps initial width are performed to demonstrate tunable wavelength conversion using a step change in dispersion and using a loss element. Wavelength shifts are tunable by varying the magnitude of a dispersion step or loss element that is used to disrupt the soliton cycle. Competing nonlinear effects, such as cubic dispersion, self-steepening, and stimulated Raman scattering, can be minimized by using input pulsewidths of one picosecond or greater. The separated pulses at two wavelengths can in principle be amplified to form separate higher order solitons. The process repeated to produce multiple wavelength replicas of an input data stream, and may thus be of possible use in multi-casting applications in fiber communication systems. The possibility of soliton recovery is also studied. For soliton recovery, conditions are stringent, in that the precise temporal overlap and phase relationship between sub-pulses that occurred at the point of separation is in principle needed at the reverse perturbation location. Experimental studies on soliton recovery for an N=2 soliton is performed by using a dispersion-compensated intermediate link, and reversing the dispersion step. Detrimental effects on soliton recovery are studied.

Since the introduction of optical fibers in 1960's in communication systems, researchers have encountered many challenges to improve the signal quality at the receiver as well as transmitting the signal as distant as possible. The former was achieved by employing coherent receivers, which let us use M-array modulation formats, such as QPSK, or QAM, and polarization of the signal. The later is accomplished by the advent of optical amplifiers. Optical amplifiers enable us to compensate for the loss occurred within the fiber optic line, without the need for optical-electrical signal conversion. These amplifiers add noise to the line which interacts with the nonlinearity in the fiber line. This interaction causes phase change in the propagating signal called nonlinear phase noise, which degrades the system performance. In this study we will derive an analytical expression for the linear and nonlinear phase noise variance in dispersion unmanaged fiber optic systems, using a first-order perturbation theory. We use numerical examples to depict the proposed system performance in terms of nonlinear phase noise variance. We will conclude that the nonlinear phase variance in a dispersion unmanaged system is much lower than the corresponding noise variance in a dispersion managed system. We will use this concept and will introduce more dispersion in the line by adding fiber brag gratings (FBGs) throughout the fiber link. Through numerical simulations, we will illustrate the improvement we get by adding FBG in each span. We will show that employing FBG improves the system performance for systems working at symbol rates 5 GBaud, which we get the best improvement to less than 20 GBaud, and beyond 20 GBaud there will be no improvement. Nowadays, telecommunication systems based on fiber optics are working at symbol rates around 28 GBaud. We will introduce new models to reduce the nonlinear phase, by splitting digital back propagation (DBP) between transmitter and receiver, and using optical phase conjugation (OPC) in the line. We will prove that the new proposed models lower the phase noise variance significantly, for single pulses. We will also illustrate numerical examples to validate the betterment they provide in terms of Q-factor. / Thesis / Master of Applied Science (MASc)

<p>Nonlinear optical microscopy serves as a great tool for biomedical imaging due to its high resolution, deep penetration, inherent three dimensional optical sectioning capabilities and superior performance in scattering media. Conventional nonlinear optical microscopy techniques, e.g. two photon fluorescence and second harmonic generation, are based on detecting a small light signal emitted at a new wavelength that is well separated from the excitation light. However, there are also many other nonlinear processes, such as two-photon absorption and self-phase modulation, that do not generate light at new wavelengths and that have not been extensively explored for imaging. This dissertation extends the accessible mechanisms for contrast to the later nonlinear optical processes by combining femtosecond laser pulse shaping and homodyne detection. We developed a rapid pulse shaper with a relatively simple and compact instrument design that modifies the spectrum of individual laser pulses from an 80 MHz mode-locked laser. The pulse shaper enables simultaneous two-photon absorption and self-phase modulation imaging of various nanoparticles in-vitro with high sensitivity. We also applied this imaging technique to study the nonlinear optical response in graphene. Because our technology detects the nonlinear signature encoded within the laser pulse itself, we achieve intrinsic contrast of biological and non-biological samples in highly scattering media. These capabilities have significant implications in biomedical imaging and nanophotonics.</p> / Dissertation

The dependence of thickness and concentration product (TCP) of single-wall carbon nanotubes saturable absorber (SWCNTs SA) on stabilizing and shortening pulse width in passively mode-locked erbium-doped fiber ring laser (MLEDFL) was investigated and measured. The TCP represented the amounts of SWCNTs, which the optical beam encountered when passing through the SWCNTs SA. If the TCP was smaller than 8.25 (£gm x wt%), the spectral bandwidth was below 2 nm. The pulse shaping was dominated by its own self amplitude modulation (SAM) of SWCNTs SA. With further increasing TCP, the soliton-like ML operation was achieved and the spectral bandwidth was expanded to 6 nm. For soliton-like mode locking (ML) operation, the area theorem dominated the pulse shaping. Through area theorem analysis, the estimation of SPM increased as the TCP increased. The adequate enhanced SPM for balancing the slight negative GVD was provided to generate soliton-like ML pulses shorten the pulse width. However, as the TCP increased, the soliton pulse energy decreased. The decreasing soliton pulse energy restricted the further pulse shortening. The results showed that the dependence of the pulse energy and nonlinear self phase modulation (SPM) on TCP enabled to determine the shortest pulse width in MLEDFL based on the area theorem. At optimized TCP of 70.93 (£gm x wt%), it was found that the shortest pulse width of 418 fs. In addition, based on the estimated SPM from area theorem, the nonlinear refractive index n2 was calculated at the level of 0.4 - 1 x 10^-15 m^2/W that was close to the literature values of 10^-15 - 10^-16 m2/W. It provides another way to estimate the nonlinear refractive index except for the Z-scan measurement. We could also estimate the SPM if an active Z-scan measurement was taken to obtain the nonlinear refractive index of the sample. We realized the trend of pulse energy through few samples in MLEDFL, the behavior of pulse width could be theoretically simulated based on area theorem. Hence, with the area theorem analysis, the optimized TCP of SWCNTs SA could be simulated and estimated to generate the shortest pulse width from the trends of pulse energy and estimated SPM. The significant effect of TCP on pulse energy, SPM, pulse width, and spectral bandwidth of MLFLs suggests that the TCP represents the total amount of SWCNTs in SA, which can be used as one of key parameters for characterizing the passive MLFL pulse width. Through the study of the dependence of TCP on ML pulses in MLEDFL, it may provide a guideline to fabricate an effective SWCNTs SA to generate the shortest pulse width of the MLEDFL.

The wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) is a well know technique capable of increasing the total capacity of a lightwave communication system; however, the system performance can be significantly limited by the dispersive and nonlinear effects, among others. This dissertation is mainly focused on the nonlinear effects upon the short-haul and long-haul lightwave systems.The short-haul lightwave system is mainly adopted in the access network. A passive optical access network is generally used to connect individual homes to a central office of a local area, and since there is no active component installed outside the central office of the passive optical access network, the system complexity and maintenance frequency can be significantly reduced. This dissertation provides a long-reach passive optical network (LR-PON) which can further reduce the system complexity and system cost. We found that four-wave mixing (FWM) and Rayleigh backscattering induced crosstalk were two main reasons to degrade the transmission performance in our proposed LR-PON. The long-haul lightwave system is mainly adopted in the transoceanic application. Although differential phase-shit keying (DPSK) modulation format has been confirmed to be suitable for long-haul WDM system, we found that a performance dip can be observed near the system zero dispersion avelength. In this dissertation, we designed various experiments to confirm the nonlinear effect to cause the performance dip being observed, and concluded that self-phase modulation (SPM) was the dominant reason to cause the performance dip rather than cross-phase modulation (XPM) or nonlinear phase noise.

In this work, two optical devices, organic photovoltaics (OPVs) and optical fibers, are introduced. Each of these devices have performance drawbacks. The major drawbacks of organic photovoltaics is their low absorption rate due to bandgap mismatch with the solar spectrum as well as poor charge carrier mobility and short exciton diffusion length. In order to overcome some of these drawbacks and increase the efficiency of OPVs, we use plasmonic gold nanoparticles (AuNPs). We report 30% increase in the efficiency of bulk-heterojunction OPV after incorporation of 50 nm AuNPs. The optical, electrical, and thermal impacts of AuNPs on the performance of PVs have been investigated experimentally and using Lumerical Solutions and COMSOL Multiphysics® simulation packages. The major contributions of AuNPs is causing near field enhancement and increasing the absorption of the structure by 65%, decreasing the extracted carrier density by quenching the excitons, changing the workfunction of the structure, as well as increasing the temperature of their surrounded medium when exited at their plasmon resonance frequency. Furthermore, one of the challenges in devices made from optical fibers such as wavelength division multiplexing systems, is self-phase modulation (SPM) which is a nonlinear phenomenon. We introduce a novel method to remove the SPM in liquid core optical fibers (LCOF) using nonlinear organic chromophores with a negative third-order susceptibility. The idea of this work is to eliminate the effective nonlinear refractive index that the optical pulses are experiencing while propagating through the LCOF. Further, a novel method is introduced to characterize the third-order optical nonlinear susceptibility of organic chromophores in LCOF system. The presented method is simple, and can be extended to the characterization of other nanoscale particles such as quantum dots and plasmonic metal nanoparticles in solutions. Finally, a convenient method is presented that enables researchers to investigate the mechanisms behind photobleaching of various materials. The photostability of materials is of great importance for their acceptance in commercial systems such as organic photovoltaics, electro-optic (EO) modulators and switches, etc. This method is based on the simultaneous detection of different signals such as second-, and third-harmonic generations as well as two-, and three-photon excitation fluorescence using multi-photon microscopy.

No description available.

All-optical signal processing has grown over the last decade due to the demand for high-speed and high-bandwidth data processing. The main objective of all-optical signal processing is to avoid signal conversions from the optical domain to electrical domain and then back to optical, which introduces noise and bottlenecks data transmission speeds. These conversions can be avoided by manipulating light using an optical medium, e.g. an optical fiber, and taking advantage of the nonlinear response of the medium's dipoles to an external electric field. Nonlinear effects arising from the third-order nonlinearities, such as the Kerr effect, allow for an intense light beam to modify the refractive index of a medium through which it propagates. As a consequence, the phase of the light beam changes as it propagates and new frequencies are generated; this phenomenon is referred to as self-phase modulation (SPM). Light's ability to modify not only its own properties but also the properties of other co-propagating beams has been widely applied in telecommunications to create integrated all-optical data regenerators. While optical fibers are mainly utilized to transmit data at extreme speeds, they can also act as sensors when considering the reflected signal as opposed to the transmitted signal. Surprisingly, most of the fiber sensing field relies on electrically-driven components for manipulating light and does not take advantage of all-optical signal processing capabilities. In this thesis, we demonstrate the use of the nonlinear Kerr effect to improve aspects of both fiber point and distributed sensing. These sensing scenarios respectively refer to the use of a fiber as a single sensing element, and to the detection of external perturbations continuously along the entire length of the fiber. The sensing improvement are obtained by first inducing a sinusoidal modulation on the light before it experiences self-phase modulation in a nonlinear medium, leading to the generation of optical sidebands. By judiciously adjusting the peak power of the light and extracting a specific sideband, multiple all-optical signal processing functions are achieved. First, high extinction ratio pulses can be generated by extracting a higher-order sideband, which allows for extending the sensing distance of distributed fiber-based sensors. The extinction ratio refers to the ratio between the pulse peak and pedestal powers. To quantify the generated extinction ratios, we develop a measurement technique based on a single-photon counter and measure a pulse exhibiting a 120 dB extinction ratio, which was originally created by an electro-optic modulator with a 20-dB extinction ratio. Second, all-optical peak power stabilization can be achieved by extracting the first-order SPM-generated sideband. We utilize this technique to stabilize the peak power of an optical pulse sent to a distributed fiber sensor. We demonstrate that this stabilization technique allows for the detection of applied vibrations that would otherwise remain buried in the background noise. Third, we demonstrate an all-optical scheme, based on sinusoidally-modulated light experiencing SPM, that enables the magnification of fluctuations in the peak power intensity of a pulsed signal. The light's peak power at the entrance of the nonlinear medium is adjusted to reach a power regime yielding a magnification factor of 2m+1, when extracting the mth-order SPM-generated sideband. Finally, we propose a new sensing scheme composed of two all-optical signal processing steps to allow for the detection of environmental perturbations previously too small to be detected by a given intensity-based fiber sensor.

No description available.

Formatos de modulação com capacidade de ajuste às condições variáveis de propagação são de interesse para uso em redes ópticas reconfiguráveis. Alterações nos níveis de potência e no mapa de dispersão afetam o desempenho de sistemas de transmissão, limitando o alcance e a capacidade de reconfiguração da rede. Fornecer capacidade de ajuste dinâmico ao sinal transmitido, sem usar sistemas complexos de modulação ou de compensação variável de dispersão, é uma solução eficaz para se obter rendimento ótimo nas diversas condições de propagação na rede. Esta característica também é útil na instalação de redes convencionais, poupando tempo e reduzindo custos. Neste trabalho é proposto o formato de modulação NRZ com gorjeio sincronizado com o sinal como alternativa para sobrepujar as limitações impostas pelas redes reconfiguráveis. O sistema proposto tem o atrativo de permitir, além da capacidade de adaptação, a possibilidade de integração dos componentes ópticos do modulador num mesmo substrato. O desempenho do formato de modulação proposto foi analisado em diversas condições de propagação para sistemas a 10 Gbit/s, tanto em sistemas ponto-a-ponto como de longas distâncias. Esta análise foi feita por meio de modelagem matemática, simulações numéricas e experimentos em laboratório. Foi demonstrada a capacidade de ajuste a diversos mapas de dispersão e seus limites, bem como a compensação de efeitos da automodulação de fase causados por alterações no nível da potência do sinal. / Modulation formats with adjustment capability to the variable propagation conditions are of interest in reconfigurable optical networks. Changes in optical power levels and dispersion compensation map affect the transmission system performance, limiting the range and the network reconfiguration capability. To provide dynamical adjustment capability to the transmitted signal, using neither complex modulation systems nor variable dispersion compensation, is an effective solution to obtain optimal performance within the diverse network propagation conditions. This characteristic is also useful during conventional networks installation, saving time and reducing costs. In this work it is proposed the NRZ modulation format with signal synchronized chirp as an alternative to overcome the limitations imposed by the reconfigurable networks. The proposed system has the benefit of allowing, more than adaptation capability, the possibility of integration of the optical modulator\'s components in the same substrate. The proposed modulation format was analyzed under diverse propagation conditions for 10 Gbit/s, in point-to-point as well as long-haul systems. This analyses war performed by mathematical modeling, numerical simulations and laboratorial experiments. It was demonstrated the adjustment capability for diverse dispersion compensation maps and its limits as well as the compensation of the self-phase modulation effects due to changes in optical power levels.