Tunable Slow and Fast Light Generation and the Applications in Microwave Photonics

Abstract

In this thesis, new techniques to generate slow and fast light are proposed and investigated. The use of the slow and fast light for microwave photonics applications is also investigated. This thesis consists of four parts. In the first part, the generation of slow and fast light based on fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) is studied. Two techniques are proposed. In the first technique, slow and fast light is generated based on a linearly chirped fiber Bragg grating (LCFBG); and in the second technique, slow and fast light is generated based on a tilted fiber Bragg grating (TFBG). Theoretical analysis is performed which is verified by experiments. In the second part, the applications of FBG-based slow and fast light in microwave photonics are studied. These applications include all-optical tunable microwave frequency multiplication, tunable microwave chirped pulse generation, tunable phase shifting, tunable fractional order differentiation, and tunable microwave photonic filtering. In the third part, the generation of slow and fast light based on microring resonators (MRRs) is studied. Novel methods to obtain continuously tunable slow to fast light are proposed and experimentally demonstrated by using a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) MRR with MMI (multi-mode interference) couplers, and a high-contrast Ge-doped silica-on-silicon (SOS) MRR. In the fourth part, the applications of the MRR-based slow and fast light in microwave photonics are studied. These applications include all-optical tunable fractional order differentiation, and tunable fractional order Hilbert transformation.