Yum H N, Kim M E, Jang Y J, Shahriar M S
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60208, USA.
Opt Express. 2011 Mar 28;19(7):6705-13. doi: 10.1364/OE.19.006705.
Recently, a tunable bandwidth white light cavity (WLC) was demonstrated by using an anomalously dispersive intra-cavity medium to adjust a cavity linewidth without reducing the cavity buildup factor [G.S. Pati et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 99, 133601 (2007)]. In this paper, we show theoretically how such a WLC can be used to realize a distortion-free delay system for a data pulse. The system consists of two WLCs placed in series. Once the pulse has passed through them, the fast-light media in both WLCs are deactivated, so that each of these now acts as a very high reflectivity mirror. The data pulse bounces around between these mirrors, undergoing negligible attenuation per pass. The trapped pulse can be released by activating the fast-light medium in either WLC. Numerical simulations show that such a system can far exceed the delay-bandwidth constraint encountered in a typical data buffer employing slow light. We also show that the pulse remains virtually undistorted during the process.
