Description
Stimulated Brillouin scattering enables coherent coupling between optical and acoustic waves, providing a powerful platform for storing optical pulses in integrated photonic systems. Brillouin light storage relies on strict phase matching between the interacting optical and acoustic fields, making the process sensitive to the spectral and temporal properties of the optical pulses[1]. In high-gain integrated platforms, the strong optical confinement that enhances Brillouin data storage simultaneously introduces significant Kerr nonlinearities, which generate intensity-dependent phase shifts through self- and cross-phase modulation. The impact of this Kerr-induced chirp on Brillouin memory performance has remained largely unexplored. In unchirped Brillouin memories, complete transfer of energy from the optical to the acoustic only occurs for specific combinations of pulse duration and power[2,3].
In this work, through coupled-mode simulations we show that Kerr-induced chirping from a high-nonlinearity integrated waveguide can in fact enhance the memory performance by mitigating this strict requirement, allowing storage to occur even at combinations of pulse duration and power that would otherwise result in no storage. Stronger Kerr nonlinearities above 3x the modelled platform’s nonlinearity produce excessive detuning that degrades the retrieved signal. We find that an externally applied chirp can be used to compensate for the material-induced chirp restoring phase matching, allowing the Brillouin interaction to operate under near-ideal conditions even in the presence of strong nonlinearity. This strategy provides a direct experimental pathway for validating the theoretical predictions. These results provide a detailed picture of Kerr-induced detuning in Brillouin light storage and demonstrate nonlinear chirp as a tool for controlling photon-phonon interactions in integrated photonic systems.
[1] M. Merklein, B. Stiller, K. Vu, et al., Nat. Commun. 8, 574 (2017)
[2] Z. Zhu, D. J. Gauthier, and R. W. Boyd, Science 318, 1748 (2007).
[3] M. Dong and H. G. Winful, J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 32, 2514 (2015).
| I am the presenting author | Yes |
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