Brillouin dynamic grating erasure technique for fast all-optical signal processing

Abstract

Brillouin dynamic grating (BDG) is an attractive storage unit for all-optical signal storage and processing. However, the processing speed of the traditional “write–read” scheme is severely limited by the inter-process interference (IPI) due to the residual BDG. Here, we propose an all-optical “write–read–erase” scheme to avoid the IPI effect, which can effectively eliminate the residual BDG through an erase pulse. In a numerical simulation, for multi-processes to store a 7 × 7-bits Simplex code, each time, the residual BDGs from the former process are erased for the proposed scheme, and the power fluctuation of the retrieved waveform is suppressed within ±10%. In a preliminary experiment, residual BDG erase efficiencies up to 88.5% can be achieved by introducing erase pulses to neglect the IPI effect on the retrieved waveform. Without the IPI effect, all-optical signal processing will availably be speeded up, especially for short on-chip integrated circuits.