No Arabic abstract
Laser cooling of a solid is achieved when a coherent laser illuminates the material in the red tail of its absorption spectrum, and the heat is carried out by anti-Stokes fluorescence of the blue-shifted photons. Solid-state laser cooling has been successfully demonstrated in several materials, including rare-earth-doped crystals and glasses. Silica glass, being the most widely used optical material, has so far evaded all laser cooling attempts. In addition to its fundamental importance, many potential applications can be conceived for anti-Stokes fluorescence cooling of silica. These potential applications range from the substrate cooling of optical circuits for quantum information processing and cryogenic cooling of mirrors in high-sensitivity interferometers for gravitational wave detection to the heating reduction in high-power fiber lasers and amplifiers. Here we report the net cooling of high-purity Yb-doped silica glass samples that are primarily developed for high-power fiber laser applications, where special care has been taken in the fabrication process to reduce their impurities and lower their parasitic background loss. The non-radiative decay rate of the excited state in Yb ions is very small in these glasses due to the low level of impurities, resulting in near-unity quantum efficiency. We report the measurement of the cooling efficiency as a function of the laser wavelength, from which the quantum efficiency of the silica glass is calculated.
Laser cooling of a solid is achieved when a coherent laser illuminates the material, and the heat is extracted by resulting anti-Stokes fluorescence. Over the past year, net solid-state laser cooling was successfully demonstrated for the first time in Yb-doped silica glass in both bulk samples and fibers. Here, we improve the previously published results by one order of magnitude and report more than 6K of cooling below the ambient temperature. This result is the lowest temperature achieved in solid-state laser cooling of silica glass to date to the best of our knowledge. We present details on the experiment performed using a 20W laser operating at 1035nm wavelength and temperature measurements using both a thermal camera and the differential luminescence thermometry technique.
Ionizing 800-nm femtosecond laser pulses propagating in silica glass and in potassium dihydrogen phosphate (KDP) crystal are investigated by means of a unidirectional pulse propagation code. Filamentation in fused silica is compared with the self-channeling of light in KDP accounting for the presence of defect states and electron-hole dynamics. In KDP, laser pulses produce intense filaments with higher clamping intensities up to 200 TW/cm$^2$ and longer plasma channels with electron densities above $10^{16}$ cm$^{-3}$. Despite these differences, the propagation dynamics in silica and KDP are almost identical at equivalent ratios of input power over the critical power for self-focusing.
Tellurite glass fibers with embedded nanodiamond are attractive materials for quantum photonic applications. Reducing the loss of these fibers in the 600-800 nm wavelength range of nanodiamond fluorescence is essential to exploit the unique properties of nanodiamond in the new hybrid material. In the first part of this study, we report the effect of interaction of the tellurite glass melt with the embedded nanodiamond on the loss of the glasses. The glass fabrication conditions such as melting temperature and concentration of NDs added to the melt were found to have critical influence on the interaction. Based on this understanding, we identified promising fabrication conditions for decreasing the loss to levels required for practical applications.
For erbium-doped amorphous oxides, such as those that are used in compact lightwave devices interfaced with silicon, values of the refractive indices are commonly obtained empirically. This work, combining experimental and theoretical studies, examines silica as the exemplary host and the influence of erbium doping on the refractive index. Analysis of data is presented for the spectral refractive index in the ultraviolet to near infrared wavelength range of heavily erbium-doped silica thin films prepared by spin coating a sol-gel precursor on silicon and subsequent vacuum annealing. Effective medium Lorentz-Lorenz data analysis determines that the dopant component has a refractive index of 1.76(0.24) with wavelength dispersion constrained to within 2 percent. Considering the dopant as a localized ErO6 impurity complex, a corresponding theoretical refractive index of 1.662 is derived by calculating the optical polarizability and volume of the impurity. Data presented for room-temperature (293 K) photoluminescence in the vicinity of 1.54 micron are shown to be consistent with random variability in impurity sites. Inherent advantages of studying colloid-based materials are discussed. To the best of the authors knowledge, such a detailed study of the refractive index associated with erbium impurities in silica is being reported for the first time in the literature.
Photonic integrated circuits (PICs) are a key component [1] for future telecommunication networks, where demands for greater bandwidth, network flexibility, low energy consumption and cost must all be met. The quest for all optical components has naturally targeted materials with extremely large nonlinearity, including chalcogenide glasses (ChG) [2] and semiconductors, such as silicon [3] and AlGaAs [4]. Yet issues such as immature fabrication technologies for ChG, and high linear and nonlinear losses for semiconductors, motivate the search for other materials. Here we present the first demonstration of nonlinear optics in integrated silica based glass waveguides using continuous wave (CW) light. We demonstrate four wave mixing (FWM), with low (7mW) CW pump power at a wavelength of 1550nm, in high index doped silica glass ring resonators capable of performing in photonic telecommunications networks as linear filters [5]. The high reliability, design flexibility, and manufacturability of our device raises the possibility of a new platform for future low cost nonlinear all optical PICs.