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'Rogue' Light Waves Tamed

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LOS ANGELES, March 6, 2009 – A rogue wave at sea spontaneously emerges and because of its enormity, can be extremely destructive for all in its path. However, rogue waves of light, which are rare and explosive flare-ups that are mathematically similar to their oceanic counterparts, are proving quite usefull now that a group of researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) have recently discovered a way to tame them. RogueLightWave.jpg
An artist's representation of a rogue wave appearing during supercontinuum generation. (Image: UCLA)
UCLA's Daniel Solli, Claus Ropers, and Bahram Jalali are putting rogue light waves to work in order to produce brighter, more stable white light sources, a breakthrough in optics that may pave the way for better clocks, faster cameras, and more powerful radar and communications technologies.

Their findings will be presented during the 2009 Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exposition/National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference (OFC/NFOEC) March 22-26 in San Diego.

Rogue bursts of light were first spotted a year ago during the generation of a special kind of radiation called supercontinuum (SC). SC light is created by shooting laser pulses into crystals and optical fibers. Like the incandescent bulb in a lamp, it shines with a white light that spans an extremely broad spectrum. But unlike a bulb's soft diffuse glow, SC light maintains the brightness and directionality of a laser beam. This makes it suitable for a wide variety of applications – a fact recognized by the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded in part to scientists who used SC light to measure atomic transitions with extraordinary accuracy.

Despite more than 40 years of research, SC light has proven to be difficult to control and prone to instability. Though rogue waves are not the cause of this instability, the UCLA researchers suspected that a better understanding of how noise in SC light triggers rogue waves could improve their control of this bright white light. Rogue waves occur randomly in SC light and are so short-lived that the team had to employ a new technique just to spot them.

Although they are rare, they are more common than would be predicted by a bell curve distribution, governed instead by the same "L-shaped" statistics that describe other extreme events like volcanic eruptions and stock market crashes.

By tinkering with the initial laser pulses used to create SC light, Solli and his team discovered how to reproduce the rogue waves, harness them, and put them to work. His results, to be presented at OFC/NFOEC 2009, demonstrate that a weak burst of light, broadcast at the perfect "tickle spot," produces a rogue wave on demand. Instead of disrupting things, it stabilizes SC light, reducing fluctuations by at least 90 percent. The seed wave also decreases the amount of energy needed to produce a supercontinuum by 25 percent.

The process, said Solli, is similar to boiling water. "If you heat pure water, it can boil suddenly and explosively," he said. "But normal water has nucleation sites for bubble formation that, like our seed waves stimulate the supercontinuum, help the water boil smoothly with less heat."

This new-and-improved white light, funded by DARPA, could help to push forward a range of technologies. Solli and Jalali are developing time-stretching devices that slow down electrical signals; such devices could be used in new optical analog-to-digital converters 1000 times faster than current electronic versions. These converters could help to overcome the current conversion-rate bottleneck that holds back advanced radar and communication technologies.

Stabilized SC light could also be used to create superfast cameras for laboratory use or incorporated into optical clockworks.

For more information, visit: http://www.ucla.edu/


Rocky Mountain Instruments - Infrared Optics MR

Published: March 2009
Glossary
photonics
The technology of generating and harnessing light and other forms of radiant energy whose quantum unit is the photon. The science includes light emission, transmission, deflection, amplification and detection by optical components and instruments, lasers and other light sources, fiber optics, electro-optical instrumentation, related hardware and electronics, and sophisticated systems. The range of applications of photonics extends from energy generation to detection to communications and...
supercontinuum
Supercontinuum refers to a broad spectrum of light that spans a wide range of wavelengths, typically from the visible to the near-infrared or even mid-infrared regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. This phenomenon occurs when intense laser light is coupled into a nonlinear optical medium, such as a photonic crystal fiber or a nonlinear crystal. The process of supercontinuum generation involves nonlinear effects such as self-phase modulation, stimulated Raman scattering, and four-wave...
Bahram JalaliBasic ScienceClaus RopersCommunicationsDaniel SolliDARPAfiber opticslight wavesNews & FeaturesOFC/NFOECOpticsphotonicsResearch & Technologyrogue light wavesRouge bursts of lightSC lightsupercontinuumUCLAwhite light sources

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