Abstract

Stimulated Raman scattering in optical fibers find many important applications in telecommunications, in particular in Raman amplifiers and lasers. Although stimulated Raman scattering is intrinsically a quite weak process, the tight confinement and low loss of optical fibers allow for quantum conversion efficiencies approaching unity in fiber Raman devices, with threshold pump powers as low as a watt or so.¹ However, in order to realize efficient devices with conventional fibers with a raised-index core, fiber lengths of several hundred meters or even several kilometers are often used. This is often a drawback. On the other hand, holey fibers can be fabricated with an order of magnitude smaller core areas, with a corresponding increase in the Raman interaction and reduction in device length. Recently, holey fibers with effective areas as small as a few square microns have been used for Raman amplification as well as all-optical Raman modulation.² Still, these devices were operated with pulsed pump sources, to overcome the limitation of the relatively low average pump power that was available.

© 2002 Optical Society of America