Ultra High Bandwidth THz Tunable Delays using Cascaded Semiconductor Optical Amplifiers

Abstract: Tunable delays at THz bandwidths can be achieved using ultra-fast non-linearities in semiconductor optical amplifiers. In this paper, we report electrically controllable fractional delays of 330 % for 600 fs pulses propagating through two cascaded semiconductor optical amplifiers. ©2006 Optical Society of America OCIS codes: (999.9999) Slow Light, (250.5980) Semiconductor Optical Amplifiers Introduction: The ability to control the group velocity of light, usually referred to as slow/fast light, has important applications including optical buffering, RF phased array antennas and optical signal processing [1]. Slow light in semiconductors has been demonstrated using several mechanisms [2,3]. Recently, we showed that fractional tunable delays exceeding 80 % can be obtained in semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) using the phenomenon of four wave mixing [4]. However, the bandwidth of this scheme is limited to GHz frequencies by the carrier life tim