In single-walled carbon nanotubes, electron-hole pairs form tightly bound excitons because of limited screening. These excitons display a variety of interactions and processes that could be exploited for applications in nanoscale photonics and optoelectronics. Here we report on optical pulse-train generation from individual air-suspended carbon nanotubes under an application of square-wave gate...

We demonstrate passive generation of optical pulse trains with each pulse having distinct center carrier and spectra using tunable group delay (GD) staircase transfer functions. The GD steps result from opposite and equal magnitude GD slopes from narrowband and wideband tunable optical dispersion compensators. We use this technique to split the spectrum of a femtosecond pulse to a pulse burst w...

We report on a cross-gain and cross-phase modulation experiment in an InGaAsP semiconductor optical ampliier. For 150 fs pulses we observe large pulse broadening and pulse break-up resulting in performance limitations for ultrafast switching devices. Introduction: Semiconductor optical ampliiers (SOA's) are key components in high-speed optical communication networks in functions as optical swit...

In contrast to the case of quasi-monochromatic waves, a focused optical pulse in the few-cycle limit may exhibit two independent curved wavefronts, associated with phase and group retardations, respectively. Focusing optical elements will generally affect these two wavefronts differently, thus leading to very different behavior of the pulse near focus. As limiting cases, we consider an ideal di...

This paper presents a new photonic integrated circuit, namely optical pulse-train generator, which is developed based on the transfer matrix analysis of microrings and utilizes a time-interleaved architecture. This circuit can generate multiple optical pulses sequentially from a single trigger pulse, with the timing and amplitude of each pulse determined by circuit design. Hence it can be appli...

A practical method for generating high-quality optical pulses of sub-picosecond pulse widths is presented. The method uses linear chirp generation in supercontinuum pulses in a normal dispersion fiber. This linear chirp is utilized by an anomalous dispersion fiber to shorten the pulse widths down to a few hundreds of femtoseconds. This compression method results in 0.28-ps 10-GHz optical pulses...

We show that light trapped in an optical cavity can be extracted from that cavity in an ultrashort burst by means of a trigger pulse. We find a simple analytic description of this process and show that while the extracted pulse inherits its pulse length from that of the trigger pulse, its wavelength can be completely different. Cavity Optical Pulse Extraction is thus well suited for the develop...

Since the inception of the laser, pulse duration has been continuously decreased by the use of a variety of techniques: Q-switching, mode-locking, and pulse compression. We would like to present a new technique based on the addition of laser sub-harmonic, ALS, that allows the production of a single-cycle pulse with single-femtosecond pulse duration. This simple technique takes advantage of the ...