All-optical signal processing in highly nonlinear chalcogenide glass based devices.

Chalcogenide glasses, containing a chalcogen element (S, Se, Te), have generated a lot of interest as of late in the photonics community because of the large Kerr and Raman gain coefficients they exhibit (up to three orders of magnitude greater than silica) as well as transparency in the near and mid IR. These properties and others suggest that this material system is a suitable platform for compact, low power, all-optical signal processing devices. At the Centre for Ultrahigh-bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems (CUDOS) we are investigating chalcogenide glass fiber (As2Se3) and in-house ultra-high frequency pulsed laser deposited waveguides (As2S3) which respectively exhibit a nonlinear refractive index 400 and 100 times silica. I will present our work on writing strong, well apodized Bragg gratings in As2S3 waveguides, demonstrating a self-phase modulation based pulse regeneration in both fiber as well as an integrated version in waveguide and finally a wavelength converter using cross phase modulation in 1 m of As2Se3 fiber.