All-optical silicon simplified passive modulation

Abstract

In this paper we present an all-optical silicon based modulator suggested also for high power operation and for pulse picker application being used as part of fiber lasers system. The paper theoretically and experimentally investigates several new and important insights involving the dependence of the relative transmission on the pump pulse energy for different finesse values of the constructed cavity as well as the dependence of the response rate of the device to the pump wavelength due to coexistence of two physical recombination processes: fast surface effect and slow bulk recombination. To adapt the constructed silicon based cavity to be used in lasers applications, we aligned the pump and the signal beams to co-propagate through the device while the usage of a cavity allowed a low power pump to yield a significant extinction ratio at the output of the device.

Keywords

• optical modulator
• silicon
• cavity