Project Description

Future optical communications systems will exploit the nonlinearities of materials to perform all-optical functions and these functions must be performed in fibers all the way through. However, because of the modest intrinsic nonlinearities of glasses, long lengths of fibers must be used in order to generate sufficient nonlinear response. A promising alternative is to use single crystal fibers made of a ferroelectric materials, which have high nonlinearities that can be controlled with an electric field. Recently high quality single crystal ferroelectric fibers with tailored properties, structures, and shapes have been designed and fabricated in Dr. Guo's group using the laser heated pedestal growth technique. It remains to be carried out to characterize the single crystal fiber, specifically, to study ways in which short sections of these ferroelectric single crystal fibers can be integrated into a fiber transmission system, and the propagation properties controlled using bias electric fields.

In this project, the ferroelectric single crystal fibers will be characterized with regards to their modal content without bias electric field and change of temperature. The student will help design and build a real time modal structure capture system, and the interface program transferring CCD image captured to digital format for analysis and processing. The student will also use this system to examine several LHPG grown crystal samples. The intensity profile of light transmitting in a single mode and multimode silica glass fibers will be also be studied by the student, to draw a comparison between wave propagation in ferroelectric single crystal fibers and industrial optical fibers.