Progress in Brillouin Slow Light and Its Impact in Fiber Sensing.pdfVIP

© 2006 OSA/OFS 2006 a67_1.pdf TuC1.pdf Progress in Brillouin slow light and its impact in fiber sensing Miguel González Herráez, Kwang-Yong Song, Sang-Hoon Chin and Luc Thévenaz Dept. of Electronics, Univ of Alcalá, Madrid, Spain. and Nanophotonics and Metrology Lab. Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, CH-1015, Switzerland E-mail: miguelg@depeca.uah.es Abstract: This paper reviews the major advances in Brillouin slow light devices along the last two years. We also focus on the positive and negative implications of this effect in the development of fiber sensors. © 2006 Optical Society of America OCIS codes: (999.9999) Slow light; (060.4370) Nonlinear optics, fibers; (290.5900) Scattering, Brillouin 1. Introduction Slow light is known to be a very attractive approach to achieve all-optical delay lines and to provide a timing tool for photonic signal processing [1]. Successful experiments to control the light group velocity have been widely reported these past few years [2-8], showing the possibility to slow the speed of light up to nearly stopping it or to achieve group velocities exceeding the vacuum light velocity c. Most of these experiments use special media like cold atomic gases or electronic transitions in crystalline solids working at well defined wavelengths. A significant step towards real applicat