Michael Steel, School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney Australia

Library, A.2.500, Staudtstr. 2

Location details

Abstract:

Some ideas have a way of persisting and recurring over a career, sometimes in episodes of work decades apart. In this talk I'll cover two that have persisted in mine.
Early in the study of fibre Bragg gratings it was realised that they provided a rich way to interrogate the cladding mode spectrum of the host fibre. The reverse is also true: the cladding mode spectrum can reveal much about the structure of the grating, inaccessibly buried inside the core. Here I present our recent success in slicing open the individual defect structures of femtosecond laser written gratings and studying how their detailed morphology underpins spectra we first measured at Macquarie 17 years ago.
One of the fundamental challenges in building integrated photonic platforms for stimulated Brillouin scattering is the conflicting material requirements for simultaneous confinement of light and sound. In general, we seem to be fighting a tendency of nature to abhor integrated SBS!  After reviewing some of the strategies to overcome this problem, I discuss recent developments on tackling it using anti-resonant or "ARROW" guidance applied to elastic waves. This strategy traces back to the earliest period of integrated photonics in the mid 1980s, and through a class of fascinating high index inclusion micro-structured fibres we studied in Sydney in the late noughties.