Coherent Ultrafast Optical Signal Processing Using Stabilized Optical Frequency Combs

The University Of Central Florida Board Of Trustees, Orlando FL

Investigators

Abstract

The demand for bandwidth continues to increase, as technologies such as computers, cell phone, and tablets, become connected through the internet. Key business activities, such as e-commerce, bank transactions, stock trading, and the transmission of high bandwidth services, such as streaming video and gaming, also contribute to the significant demand for bandwidth. New developing applications become possible given that the access to bandwidth increases. These new applications are enabled by access to increased bandwidth, resulting in the consumption of more bandwidth and thus increasing the demand. This results in a situation of ever increasing demands for bandwidth. As the demand for bandwidth increases, new approaches in the distribution, transmission and processing of this bandwidth are required, thus generating the need for the development of new device technologies. In addition, new system architectures may need to be considered based on emerging device technologies. The development of new photonic technologies and approaches to communication, computing and signal processing are needed to keep ahead of the continually increasing demand for bandwidth. The significance and importance of developing new technologies and methods for communications, computing and signal processing is that these new devices and approaches will be more energy efficient, compact, and cost effective, resulting in applications and services that are broadband, ubiquitous and low cost. As these services become more ubiquitous and low cost, access to these high bandwidth environments will be accessible to a broad population, thus improving the overall intellectual and economic strength of the Nation. We propose to develop ultra-broadband optical communication and signal processing technologies relying on the unique properties of injection locked micro-cavity laser oscillators such as the Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Laser. The approaches exploit the ability to simultaneously select single wavelength components from a multi-wavelength frequency comb laser, and realize high speed modulation or detection functionality. These devices will then be used in an ultrafast coherent parallel signal processing architecture, realizing functionality ranging from format independent optical communications, optical sampling, optical arbitrary waveform generation and detection. It is anticipated that multi-wavelength comb lasers combined with vertical cavity surface emitting laser arrays could provide processing, communication and computing speeds of 5 terabits per second, equivalent to 1 million TV channels. The intellectual significance is that the newly developed technologies will enable researchers to conceive of new approaches to the challenges of transmitting and processing massive amounts of data, which has been identified as one of the grand challenges in the 21 century. In addition, young scientists and engineers will be trained in these cutting edge technological areas, thus allowing for the rapid incorporation of these approaches into commercial industry.