Harmonic oscillations in optical waveguide arrays

Jianxiong Wu

Aitchison Group, Photonics

Abstract:

Optical analogies to other physical systems have been attractive topics in recent years. In coupled optical lattices, phenomena originated from electronic systems, such as Bloch oscillations, Dynamic localization and Zener tunneling, have been extensively investigated and led to novel research directions and applications. Following this idea, harmonic oscillations are spatially mimicked by the propagation of supermodes in quadratically-coupled waveguide arrays. By analyzing the field envelope with the propagation constants and the superposition of the supermodes, we achieve conjugate-imaging at the half-period plane and self-imaging at the full-period plane with arbitrary excitations. The conjugate-imaging gives rise to the linear switching: in an N-waveguide array (N is odd), the light injected at waveguide j expands and then relocalizes at waveguide (N-j+1). Combining the linear switching and the nonlinear light propagation triggered at high power level, we demonstrate the superior performances of nonlinear power switching compared with traditional nonlinear directional couplers.

Biography:

Jianxiong (Jason) Wu received his B.Sc. degree in Applied Physics from South China Agricultural University, and recently completed his M.A.Sc. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Toronto. During his master thesis research, he worked in Prof. J. Stewart Aitchison’s group with research topics on oscillations in optical waveguide arrays and integrated optical circuit design/fabrication.