Stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) is a recent technique developed to generate slow light in optical fibres. It is the simplest and most applicable method of slow light production. In this paper a high power laser pump was used to provide the Brillouin gain of a low power signal of -10 dBm. Three single mode fibres namely, standard fibre (STD), large area fibre (LA) and reduced slope fibre (...

A core component of all scanning near-field optical microscopy (SNOM) systems is the optical probe, which has evolved greatly but still represents the limiting component for the system. Here, we introduce a new type of optical probe, based on a Fractal Fibre which is a special class of photonic crystal fibre (PCF), to directly address the issue of increasing the optical throughput in SNOM probe...

We present a computational study of the internal optical forces arising in plasmonic gap antennas, dolmen structures and split rings. We find that very strong internal forces perpendicular to the propagation direction appear in these systems. These internal forces show a rich behaviour with varying wavelength, incident polarisation and geometrical parameters, which we explain in terms of the po...

New developments in wavefront and polarisation control for ultrashort-pulse laser microprocessing are presented. Two Spatial Light Modulators are used in combination to structure the optical fields of a picosecond-pulse laser beam, producing vortex wavefronts and radial or azimuthal polarisation states. Demonstration of multiple first-order beams with vortex wavefronts and radial or azimuthal p...

When light is passing through a rotating medium the optical polarisation is rotated. Recently it has been reasoned that this rotation applies also to the transmitted image (Padgett et al. 2006). We examine these two phenomena by extending an analysis of Player (1976) to general electromagnetic fields. We find that in this more general case the wave equation inside the rotating medium has to be ...

To compensate the performance degradation induced by polarisation mode dispersion (PMD) in high-speed optical transmission, a single-input multiple-output (SIMO) decision feedback equaliser (DFE) technique is proposed to combat all orders of PMD-induced distortion. The scheme is based on a new SIMO PMD channel model which utilises information embedded in both polarisation states. The performanc...

a Photonics Research Group, Aston University, Aston Triangle, Birmingham, B4 7ET, U.K. Photonics Research Laboratory, Cyprus University of Technology, Cyprus Telephone: (+44)121-359-3611 ext. 4952 Fax: (+44) 121-359-0156 email: [email protected] ABSTRACT A series of LPGs was inscribed in photonic crystal fibre by a low repetition femtosecond laser system. When subjected to bending they w...

We study a limited set of optical circuits for creating near maximal polarisation entanglement without the usual large vacuum contribution. The optical circuits we consider involve passive interferometers, feed-forward detection, down-converters and squeezers. For input vacuum fields we find that the creation of maximal entanglement using such circuits is impossible when conditioned on two dete...

Circular type’ interferometric system for quantum key distribution is proposed. The system has naturally self-alignment and compensation of birefringence and also has enough efficiency against polarisation dependence. Moreover it is easily applicable to multi-party. Key creation with 0.1 photon per pulse at a rate of 1.2KHz with a 5.4% QBER over a 200m fiber was realized. Quantum key distributi...

The significance of nuclear spin polarisation in time-resolved optical studies of III-V semiconductors is addressed. Electron Larmor beats in pump-probe reflectivity from a GaAs/AlGaAs quantum well show Overhauser shift of 0.7 T due to accumulated nuclear polarisation 〈I〉/I=0.065. This leads to precision values of electron g-factor, elucidates nuclear spin pumping and diffusion mechanisms in qu...