Lectures 7: Nonlinear Fiber Optics

The current lecture is based on the book Govind P. AgrawalNonlinear Fiber Optics Academic Press 2001

Fiber Nonlinearities
Induced polarization: - vacuum permittivity jth order susceptibility

X(2) vanishes in fused silica (SiO2 is a symmetric molecule) The lowest-order nonlinear effect in optical fiber originate from X(3) Refractive index in a fiber: The intensity dependence of the refractive index leads to self-phase modulation (SPM), cross-phase modulation (XPS), etc. Phase on the optical field: Nonlinear phase-shift due to SPM:

The nonlinear phase-shift at

:
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Stimulated inelastic scattering

By stimulated inelastic scattering part of the energy to the medium. These phenomena are known as stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) and stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS). SRS involves optical phonons while acoustic phonons participate in SBS. QM picture: A photon of the incident field is annihilated to create a photon at the downshifted Stokes frequency and phonon with right energy and momentum to conserve the energy and the momentum. Similar for anti-Stokes Due to the different dispersion relations for acoustic and optical phonons SBS in optical fibers occurs only in the backward direction, SRS dominate in the forward direction.
Is is the Stokes intensity, Ip is the pump intensity, and gR is the Raman-gain coefficient. Similar for SBS with the Brillouin-gain coefficient gB. For SRS: bandwidth of 30 THz, gR= 1x 10-11 cm/W at 1 m, Stokes shift of 13 THz. For SBS: narrow bandwidth of 10 MHz, gB= 1x 10-9 cm/W, and Stokes shift of 10 GHz.

SRS and SBS exhibit a threshold like behavior:

Wave propagation in optical fibers

Maxwells equations: E and H are electric and magnetic field vectors, D and B are corresponding electric and magnetic flux densities, Jf is current density vector and is charge density. In optical fibers Jf = 0 and = 0.
, where is the vacuum permittivity, is the vacuum permeability, and and are induced electric and magnetic polarizations. For optical fibers =0.

It is easy to obtain:

Wave propagation in optical fibers: Part 2

At any frequency optical fiber can support a finite number of guided modes and continuum of unguided radiation modes. The spatial distribution is a solution of the wave equation + boundary conditions. Energy transfer between guided and radiation modes!
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Wave propagation - guided modes in OF

Wave equation in cylindrical coordinates Substitution:

Core radius Bessel-like equation, Jm Bessel function, Km modified Bessel function

Solution: Similar for the magnetic field component

Boundary condition: the tangential component of E and H is continuous across the core-cladding interface . This leads to an eigenvalue equation whose solution determine the propagation constant for the fiber modes.

Wave propagation - guided modes in OF: Part 2

The eigenvalue equation may have several solutions for each integer value of m. m corresponds to longitudinal modes and n to transversal, designed as HEmn (electric) and EHmn (magnetic). The number of modes supported by specific fiber at a given wavelength depends on its design parameters: core radius a and the core-cladding index difference n1 - n2. An important parameter for each fiber is its cut-off frequency. The value of k when =0 for a given mode determines the cut-off frequency. Normalized frequency V:
V = 2# d core ! NA "

NA =

2 2 ncore ! nclad

Single mode fiber support only the fundamental mode HE11. All other modes are beyond cut-off if the parameter V < Vc, where Vc is the smallest solution of J0 (Vc ) = 0 or V = 2.405.

Wave propagation - guided modes in OF: Part 3

Single mode fiber support only the fundamental mode HE11. All other modes are beyond cut-off if the parameter V < Vc, where Vc is the smallest solution of J0 (Vc ) = 0 or V = 2.405. Cut-off wavelength for single mode fiber:

Number

of modes M: M ~ 4V2/2 ~ 0.4V2

Basic propagation equation

The electronic contribution to X(3) occurs at a time scale of 1-10 fs in OF. For pulse widths > 0.1 ps the nonlinear response is instantaneous.

Basic propagation equation: Part 2

Here A(z,t) is the amplitude of the pulse envelope, F(x,y) is the field distribution in the (x,y) plane and corresponds to the mode structure.

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Basic propagation equation: Part 3

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Basic propagation equation #4

12

Generalized propagation equation

In Fourier transformation:

Equation (7) is called Generalized Propagation Equation!

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Generalized Nonlinear Schrdinger Equation

Responsible for the self-frequency shift due to Raman Stokes shift of the central frequency . The effect is significant for ultrashort pulses with spectral width - the slope of the Raman gain (assumed to be linear around For fused silica Substitution: )

Eq. (8) is called Generalized Nonlinear Schrdinger Equation

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Nonlinear Schrdinger equation

For pulses with

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Optical Solitons
The starting point is the nonlinear Schrdinger equation (NLSE): Here A(z,T) is the amplitude of the pulse envelope, 2 is GVD parameter, and is the nonlinear parameter responsible for SPM (self-phase modulation). The cw wave peak power at z = 0 and is solution of NSE, when P0 is the incident is the phase shift given by:

However, the steady-state solution is not stable against small perturbations. NLSE can be solved exactly using the inverse scattering method discovered by Gardner et al. (1967) and applied for NLSE by Zakharov and Shabat (1972). It is useful to normalize NLSE by introducing: , where T0 is the pulse duration, LD and LNL are called dispersive and nonlinear Length, respectively, and are defined by: We obtain:

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Optical Solitons Part 2

For anomalous GVD Further substitution:

If

is solution of eq. (12), then is an arbitrary scaling factor.

is also a solution, where

In the inverse scattering method the scattering problem associated with eq. (12) is:

Where v1 and v2 are the amplitudes of the waves scattering in the potential and is the eigenvalue. For given initial form of , Eqs. (13) and (14) are used to obtain the initial scattering data. The direct scattering problem is characterized by reflection coefficient . The initial scattering data consist of the reflection coefficient , the poles of in the complex -plane, and their residues c, where j = 1 to N if N such poles exist.
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Optical Solitons Part 3

In the case in which vanishes for an initial potential corresponds to solitons. The solution can be determined by solving a set of algebraic equations. The soliton order is characterized by the number N of poles or eigenvalue The general solution is:

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