High Resolution Spectral Metrology Leveraging Topologically Enhanced Optical Activity in Fibers

Abstract

Optical rotation, a form of optical activity, is a phenomenon employed in various metrological applications and industries including chemical, food, and pharmaceutical. In naturally-occurring, as well as structured media, the integrated effect is, however, typically small. Here, we demonstrate that, by exploiting the inherent and stable spin-orbit interaction of orbital angular momentum fiber modes, giant, scalable optical activity can be obtained, and that we can use this effect to realize a new type of wavemeter by exploiting its optical rotary dispersion. The device we construct provides for an instantaneous wavelength-measurement technique with high resolving power $R=3.4\times 10^6$ (i.e. resolution $<0.3pm$ at $1-\mu m$ wavelengths) and can also detect spectral bandwidths of known lineshapes with high sensitivity.

arXiv comment27 pages, 12 figures, Supplementary materials, presented at CLEO 2019 and 2020

References in corpus (13)

• On-Chip Random Spectrometer
• Communication with spatially modulated Light through turbulent Air across Vienna
• Higher-dimensional orbital angular momentum based quantum key distribution with mutually unbiased bases
• Conservation of orbital angular momentum in air core optical fibers
• Picometer-resolution dual-comb spectroscopy with a free-running fibre laser
• Spatio-temporal vortex beams and angular momentum
• High-resolution and broadband all-fiber spectrometers
• Fiber-assisted single-photon spectrograph
• Harnessing speckle for a sub-femtometre resolved broadband wavemeter and laser stabilization
• Observation of Interaction of Spin and Intrinsic Orbital Angular Momentum of Light
• Overcoming the speckle correlation limit to achieve a fiber wavemeter with attometer resolution
• Sensitive and broadband measurement of dispersion in a cavity using a Fourier transform spectrometer with kHz resolution
• Quantum optical rotatory dispersion