Electrical control of light in optical fibers

by Walter Margulis (Acreo AB)

Thursday 31 May 2007, 10:00 → 11:00 Europe/Stockholm

Optical fibres with holes are fabricated by Acreo's FiberLab in Hudiksvall. They guide light as conventional fibres but the holes can be processed and entirely filled with metal electrodes and used to control light propagation. For instance, they can be driven by high current pulses applied for time intervals in the nanosecond range, resulting in birefringence and index change. High-speed polarization rotation and fibre Bragg grating wavelength tuning can be accomplished. Fibres with electrodes can also be rendered electrooptical and fibre phase modulators can be constructed. In Sagnac or Mach-Zehnder interferometers, such devices allow for amplitude modulation. In this talk we will describe our research on the subject of electrical control of light in fibres and describe current issues being studied.