Abstract
Fast light experiments are particularly challenging and fascinating for the scientific community, since superluminal signal velocities can be achieved (however preserving Einstein’s causality). These experiments require inducing a very large anomalous dispersion in the medium at the signal frequency. Sharp atomic absorptions and electromagnetically-induced absorption (EIA) have provided a mean to obtain this large anomalous dispersion. In fibers, the narrowband loss of stimulated Brillouin scattering has been used to create these conditions. All these methods for obtaining fast light, however, have the common drawback of making the pulse propagate in a spectral region of high absorption. To overcome this impairment, two methods have been devised: one is to propagate the pulse in a region slightly detuned from a gain line, where the group velocity change is negative; the other, more sophisticated approach is to make use of the large anomalous dispersion appearing between two gain peaks. These methods have been previously demonstrated in atomic vapours. In a previous paper [1] we reported the first experimental demonstration of pulse advancement with gain in optical fibers using stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS). We tested the two methods described above to achieve gain-assisted fast light and demonstrated experimentally that the method based on the double Brillouin gain peak produces pulse advancement with lower distortion. However, the distortion achieved in these experiments was still far from ideal, and the underlying scientific challenge to produce fast light with negligible distortion remains intact. In this paper we propose a simple scheme for achieving fast light with low distortion, based on the unique and flexible properties of Brillouin amplification. We demonstrate experimentally that this scheme delivers better results than the previously reported ones, and hence might open new possibilities in fundamental research on fast light.
© 2007 IEEE
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