Free-carrier-induced soliton fission unveiled by in situ measurements in nanophotonic waveguides

Chad Husko (), Matthias Wulf (), Simon Lefrancois, Sylvain Combrié, Gaëlle Lehoucq, Alfredo De Rossi, Benjamin J. Eggleton and L. Kuipers
Additional contact information
Chad Husko: Centre for Ultrahigh bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems (CUDOS), Institute of Photonics and Optical Science (IPOS), School of Physics, University of Sydney
Matthias Wulf: Center for Nanophotonics, FOM Institute AMOLF
Simon Lefrancois: Centre for Ultrahigh bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems (CUDOS), Institute of Photonics and Optical Science (IPOS), School of Physics, University of Sydney
Sylvain Combrié: Thales Research and Technology,
Gaëlle Lehoucq: Thales Research and Technology,
Alfredo De Rossi: Thales Research and Technology,
Benjamin J. Eggleton: Centre for Ultrahigh bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems (CUDOS), Institute of Photonics and Optical Science (IPOS), School of Physics, University of Sydney
L. Kuipers: Center for Nanophotonics, FOM Institute AMOLF

Nature Communications, 2016, vol. 7, issue 1, 1-7

Abstract: Abstract Solitons are localized waves formed by a balance of focusing and defocusing effects. These nonlinear waves exist in diverse forms of matter yet exhibit similar properties including stability, periodic recurrence and particle-like trajectories. One important property is soliton fission, a process by which an energetic higher-order soliton breaks apart due to dispersive or nonlinear perturbations. Here we demonstrate through both experiment and theory that nonlinear photocarrier generation can induce soliton fission. Using near-field measurements, we directly observe the nonlinear spatial and temporal evolution of optical pulses in situ in a nanophotonic semiconductor waveguide. We develop an analytic formalism describing the free-carrier dispersion (FCD) perturbation and show the experiment exceeds the minimum threshold by an order of magnitude. We confirm these observations with a numerical nonlinear Schrödinger equation model. These results provide a fundamental explanation and physical scaling of optical pulse evolution in free-carrier media and could enable improved supercontinuum sources in gas based and integrated semiconductor waveguides.

Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms11332 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:7:y:2016:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms11332

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms11332

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().