Induced All Optical Beam Deflectors for Ultrafast Low-Level Optical Waveform Digitization

The feasibility to apply a nonlinear optical based all-optical induced switch for the future ultrafast waveform digitization and processing applications has been tested in this program. Induced optical elements prism, grating, lens, etc. can create small scale optical elements for data communication and information processing. The ultrafast all optical deflector is based on a geometric space refractive index change induced by an area-modulated ultrafast laser pulse in a nonlinear optical material. A transient prism-like modulation can be formed and will in turn deflect a signal beam on the picosecond time scale. This program has utilized some of existing facilities, staff, and state-of-the-art equipment in photonic research at CCNY. A picosecond YAG laser system and a Tisapphire femtosecond laser system were used to setup the experiment for the design consideration of a high speed induced deflector and to study promising materials for the induced nonlinear optical process. Nonlinear optical materials included CS2 liquid, supercooled salol, plastic crystal succinite, ZnSe, glass and doped polymers. They were tested to study parameters such as third order optical nonlinearity, response time, absorption and geometrical distortion. The results using a Bi-Pb-Ga doped glass with fast and large optical nonlinearity are described in section 4.1. Future research should be aimed toward the design of a time resolved DWDM optical interconnect using spectral nonlinear optical elements and the development of a compact system with Terabitssec to petabitssec capability using array of transient optical circuits.