Active and passive fibre components

Abstract

The development of optical fibres for transmission has given us an advanced technology capable of producing waveguides of unequalled transparency and axial uniformity. This can be adapted to produce a range of active and passive components that have many advantages, including their suitability for connection into optical fibre systems. These may in turn enable more complex frequency-selective systems to be built economically. Passive components include resonators and reflectors with very low loss and linewidths that are comparable with the modulation rates, possibly allowing radio type filtering and separation; splitters and separators with a wide variety of characteristics and polarization-selective components. In each case the performance achieved is better than that achieved by any other method. Active devices include laser sources and amplifiers of various types and nonlinear switches and pulse compressors; these too show performance ahead of that achieved by other means. This paper reviews these results and discusses applications to broadband networks.