Picosecond pulse switching in a lossy acousto-optic tunable filter (AOTF)

Studied the transmission characteristics of the AOTF operating with ultrashort light pulses (2ps). Initially one consider the performance of the device, operating in the nonlinear regime without loss. It was observed that the effect of dispersion and nonlinearity, has strong influence on the pulse propagation when one increase the length of the AOTF. For shorter length of the device the switched pulse is presenting time broadening. For higher length of the device, pulse breakup was observed. Considering the AOTF with loss one consider the device of length 0.25 mm with loss of 4 dB/mm constructed with an increasing nonlinearity profile. It was observed that the increase of the nonlinearity lead the switched pulse from broadening to optical compression. One can say that one can operate the AOTF in a configuration that can avoid the pulse break up and have a switched pulse with a shorter time duration compared with the lossy AOTF. The study of the AOTF operating with ultra short optical solitons provides possibilities for achieving, high efficiency in ultrafast all-optical signal processing, especially for optical switches, filters and optical transistors.