Phase engineered wavelength conversion of ultra-short optical pulses in TI:PPLN waveguides

A phase engineered all-optical wavelength converter for ultra-short pulses (down to 140 fs) in a Ti-diffused, periodically poled lithium niobate (Ti:PPLN) waveguide is proposed. The phase engineering, due to the phase conjugation between signal and idler (converted signal) pulses which takes place in the cascaded second harmonic generation and difference frequency generation (cSHG/DFG) based wavelength conversion, already leads to shorter idler pulses. The proposed device consists of an unpoled (passive) waveguide section beside of the PPLN waveguide section in order to compensate pulse broadening and phase distortion of the idler pulses induced by the wavelength conversion (in the PPLN section). For example numerical analysis shows that a 140 fs input signal pulse is only broadened by 1.6% in a device with a combination of 20 mm and 6 mm long periodically poled and unpoled waveguide sections. Thus, cSHG/DFG based wavelength converters of a bandwidth of several Tbits/s can be designed.