Abstract
Supercontinuum radiation [1] has found various applications in optical frequency metrology, spectroscopy, tomography, and optical characterization of photonic band gap materials due to its unique properties such as high spatial coherence and spectral brightness, as well as high peak intensity and average power. Recently, it was suggested that tunable spatial-spectral reshaping of supercontinuum light beams is possible in nonlinear arrays of coupled optical waveguides. In straight waveguide arrays, power-dependent separation and recombination of spectral components was observed, however the output beam profile always remained symmetric with blue components dominant in the beam centre and red components defining the outer edges [2]. In this work, we suggest that such limitations can be overcome in specially designed curved nonlinear waveguide arrays, shown schematically in Fig. 1(a). We demonstrate numerically nonlinearly-induced symmetry breaking of the output beam profile. This phenomenon facilitates possibilities for tunable all-optical sorting of input ultra-broad spectrum beams into narrow spectrum output channels, realizing demultiplexing of individual spectral components.
© 2009 IEEE
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