Abstract

The area of Holey Fiber (HF) technology¹ has progressed rapidly in recent years and has been successfully applied to the development of a number of nonlinear optical devices. For example, we recently demonstrated a nonlinear optical switch based on the Kerr effect in just 3.3 m of HF,² and a high gain Raman amplifier using just 75 m of fiber.¹ In this paper we show that HF technology can also be applied to another important class of nonlinear fiber-optic devices— namely those devices based on the Brillouin effect. More specifically, we provide what we believe to be the first experimental demonstration of a HF based Brillouin laser.

© 2002 Optical Society of America