Photonic Nanowires for Pulse Compression and Sensing Applications

Photonic nanowires are very promising waveguides for mid-IR low-power devices and applications. This talk will give an overview of low loss photonic nanowires with diameters smaller than the wavelength of the guided light. A new design of optical waveguide exhibiting high nonlinearities and large anomalous velocity dispersion is presented. The design of waveguides made of highly nonlinear glasses such as chalcogenide and tellurite is shown to be suitable for efficient soliton self-compression with low input pulse energies of sub-nJ level. Broadband coherent supercontinua (SC) with more than one octave spanning are generated. New designs of mid-IR sources operating beyond 2μm are proposed by tapering photonic crystal fibers yielding the generation of broadband mid-IR SC. A design of a photonic nanowire that is well suited for an efficient and controlled interaction of guided light with matter for sensing applications is proposed and is shown to be very attractive for compact, flexible, real-time and high sensitive refractometric sensing.