PICOSECOND OPTICAL NONLINEARITY OF SEMICONDUCFOR-DOPED FIBRE

There is increasing interest in the potential of semiconductor-doped glasses as nonlinear materials for future high-speed switching and logic devices. This interest stems from the reported large bandgap-resonant optical susceptibilities1,2 and the observation of picosecond response times,3,4 combined with the technological advantages of glasses. Picosecond optical bistability in a bulk Fabry-Perot resonator has been reported.5 A significant advance towards the practical application of these materials is the fabrication of waveguiding structures,6 thus allowing high intensities to be obtained with light sources of modest power. Recently, we reported the fabrication of multimode optical fibre with a semiconductor-doped core.7