UC San Diego

Both scientific and engineering endeavors in short-wave infrared and mid-infrared spectral bands suffer from a lack of fast high quality transmitters and receivers, which, if made available, would avail advanced sensing and high speed communication in these chiefly underutilized bands of high practical interest and potential. Motivated by the status quo, this dissertation focuses on spectral translation as a powerful tool capable of successfully enabling application is these important spectral bands. In particular, the method of choice consists of employing the four-wave mixing-based spectral translation from the telecom band to short-wave infrared in silica-based highly nonlinear fibers as a platform for construction of frequency and amplitude modulated optical transmitters that are ported to the longer bands by means of wavelength conversion. Furthermore, this approach is extended to developing a telecom-derived short-wave infrared transceiver taking advantage of a two-way spectral translation. The practical importance of the contribution is demonstrated by means of momentous signal-to-noise- ratio improvement through indirect detection of weak signals in the vicinity of 2[mu]m wavelength that is not achievable by direct means. Finally, silicon as a complementary nonlinear platform, is considered expanding the concepts set forth above, to the mid-IR spectral range