Abstract

The fibre-based nonlinear optical loop mirror (NOLM)[1] has been one of the most successful devices for demonstrating a range of all-optical processing functions. Recently, the SLALOM [2] or TOAD [3] configuration has been developed where a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) is used as the nonlinear material in a fibre loop, rather than the fibre itself. The lack of full recovery in the amplifier causes an interaction between adjacent pulses in the input pulse stream which, for example, can lead to patterning effects in data demultiplexing [4]. This pulse interaction combined with optical feedback leads to an enhancement of the dynamics on timescales much shorter than the feedback time. In this work involving the TOAD/SLALOM with feedback, we have observed spontaneous clock division as a result of the non-zero response times of the SOA.

© 1996 Optical Society of America