Inducing and harnessing stimulated Brillouin scattering in photonic integrated circuits

We review recent progress in inducing and harnessing Stimulated Brillouin Scattering (SBS) in integrated photonic circuits. Exciting SBS in a chip-scale device is challenging due to the stringent requirements on materials and device geometry. We discuss these requirements which include material parameters, such as optical refractive index and acoustic velocity, and device properties such as acousto-optic confinement. Recent work on SBS in nano-photonic waveguides is presented, with special attention paid to photonic integration of applications such as narrow-linewidth lasers, slow- and fast-light, microwave signal processing, Brillouin dynamic gratings and non-reciprocal devices.
Professor Benjamin Eggleton is an ARC Laureate Fellow and Professor of Physics at the University of Sydney, Director of the ARC Centre for Ultrahigh bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems (CUDOS), and Director of the Institute of Photonics and Optical Science (IPOS) at the University of Sydney. He obtained the Bachelor's degree (with honors) in Science and the Ph.D. degree in Physics from the University of Sydney, Sydney, N.S.W., Australia, in 1992 and 1996, respectively. In 1996, he joined Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies as a Postdoctoral Member of Staff, and was then transferred to the Department of Optical Fiber Research. In 2000, he was promoted to Research Director within the Specialty Fiber Business Division of Bell Laboratories, where he was engaged in forward-looking research supporting Lucent Technologies business in optical fiber devices.

Eggleton has made pioneering contributions to nonlinear optics and all-optical signal processing with recent breakthrough achievements in the nonlinear optics of periodic media, slow-light in photonic crystals and ultrafast planar waveguide nonlinear optics. His research into new classes of nonlinear waveguides has created a new paradigm for photonic chip based ultrafast optical signal processing and his group holds various world records. His breakthroughs in the nonlinear optics of chalcogenide glasses have led to his demonstrations of new ultrafast optical devices for telecommunications applications, record low-threshold supercontinuum generation sources and on-chip parametric sources. His fundamental breakthroughs include the first demonstrations of gap soliton formation in periodic media and of slow-light-enhanced nonlinear optics in photonic crystals.

He is the author or coauthor of more than 340 journal publications and over 100 invited presentations. Prof. Eggleton is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America, IEEE and the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (ATSE). He was the recipient of the 2011 Walter Boas Medal from the Australian Institute of Physics, 2011 Eureka Prize for Leadership in Science, the 2010 Scopus Young researcher of the year award in the Physical Sciences category for the most cited Physical Scientist under the age of 40, the 2008 NSW Office of Scientific and Medical Research Physicist of the Year medal, the 2007 Pawsey Medal from the Australian Academy of Science, the 2004 Malcolm McIntosh Prize for Physical Scientist of the Year, the 2003 International Commission on Optics (ICO) Prize, the 1998 Adolph Lomb Medal from the Optical Society of America, the Distinguished Lecturer Award from the IEEE/Lasers and Electro-Optics Society, and the R&D100 Award. He was President of the Australian Optical Society and is currently Editor for Optics Communications.