I finished my coursework in 2004 so the past several years have been spent in full-time research. The projects I have been involved with include ultra-low-light all-optical switching, optical precursors and slow-light in optical fiber.

All-optical switching

In the summer of 2004 I began working with Lucas Illing to refine some work started by an undergraduate for her senior thesis. The publication of my first paper with the group: All-Optical Switching in Rubidium Vapor, Science 308, 672 (2005) was a result of our initial work.

This project is described in detail on our group website in a series of All-optical switching pages.

Slow-light in optical fiber

Stimulated Brillouin scattering in optical fiber provides a technique for creating gain and absorption features in a transparent medium. Near these features are regions of large dispersion, where the different frequency components of light travel at very different speeds. In regions of large dispersion there is typically a lot of distortion of optical signals. For the right types of dispersion, however, this distortion is actually just a delay or speed-up of optical pulses traveling through the medium.

For all-optical signal processing it can be very advantageous to have a controllable delay of optical signals. In routers or network switches, lots of data arrives at once, and shuffling each signal around traditionally required opto-electronic conversions (from optical to electronic and back). These conversions are slow and hot so our project is part of the search for new ways to manage optical data.

Keep an eye on the Gauthier Lab web page for more information on our projects.

For any questions or comments on either of these projects, please see my contact information