Tunable pulse advancement and delay by frequency-chirped stimulated Raman gain with optical nanofiber

Abstract

We demonstrate a novel method to optically tune the pulse advancement and delay based on stimulated Raman gain in hydrogen. With a frequency-chirped pump, the generated signal pulse is selectively amplified at the leading or trailing edge of the pump pulse, depending on whether the frequency difference between the pump and the signal beam is blue or red detuned from the Raman transition, which results in advancement or delay of the signal peak. Different from the method of slow/fast light, where advancement and delay are accompanied with power loss and gain, respectively, for a single resonance, both the advancement and delay are realized in the gain region for the method here. With a piece of 48-mm-long optical nanofiber in hydrogen, the time-shift for a signal peak ranging from 3.7 to −3.7 ns is achieved in a Raman-generated pulse with width of ∼12 ns.