All-optical storage and processing in optical fibers

Abstract

Abstract-The generation of dynamic Bragg gratings by the interaction of 2 optical waves through stimulated Brillouin scattering has offered the possibility to implement alloptical functions that were so far impossible to realize in optical fibers. Using this feature a local grating can be placed at any position along an optical fiber and can be repositioned dynamically with a total flexibility through a purely optical interaction. This new tool has found direct applications in all-optical delay lines, demonstrating a tunable delaying capacity of more than 1 microsecond with an ideal reconfiguration time. But it turns out that its field of application is much vaster, from optical storage and analog operations on the signal (time reversal, derivative, integration, dynamic filtering, …) to distributed sensing with an extreme spatial resolution.