Several kinds of nonlinear optical effects have been observed in recent years using silicon waveguides, and their device applications are attracting considerable attention. In this review, we provide a unified theoretical platform that not only can be used for understanding the underlying physics but should also provide guidance toward new and useful applications. We begin with a description of the third-order nonlinearity of silicon and consider the tensorial nature of both the electronic and Raman contributions. The generation of free carriers through two-photon absorption and their impact on various nonlinear phenomena is included fully within the theory presented here. We derive a general propagation equation in the frequency domain and show how it leads to a generalized nonlinear Schrödinger equation when it is converted to the time domain. We use this equation to study propagation of ultrashort optical pulses in the presence of self-phase modulation and show the possibility of soliton formation and supercontinuum generation. The nonlinear phenomena of cross-phase modulation and stimulated Raman scattering are discussed next with emphasis on the impact of free carriers on Raman amplification and lasing. We also consider the four-wave mixing process for both continuous-wave and pulsed pumping and discuss the conditions under which parametric amplification and wavelength conversion can be realized with net gain in the telecommunication band.

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Modulation instability that leads to breakup of intense cw radiation into a train of ultrashort pulses during propagation in optical fibers occurs only in the presence of anomalous group-velocity dispersion. It is shown that a new kind of modulation instability can occur even in the normal-dispersion regime when two copropagating optical fields interact with each other through cross-phase modulation initiated by the nonlinearity. The quantitative aspects of this cross-phase–modulation–induced modulation instability are discussed and illustrated by use of a realistic experimental example.

We investigate theoretically nonlinear transmission in space-division multiplexed (SDM) systems using multimode fibers exhibiting rapidly varying birefringence. A primary objective is to generalize the Manakov equations, well known in the case of single-mode fibers. We first investigate the case where linear coupling among spatial modes of the fiber is weak and derive new Manakov equations after averaging over random birefringence fluctuations. Such an averaging reduces the number of intermodal nonlinear terms drastically since all four-wave-mixing terms vanish. Cross-phase modulation terms still affect multimode transmission but their effectiveness is reduced. We verify the accuracy of new Manakov equations by simulating the transmission of multiple 114-Gb/s bit streams in the PDM-QPSK format over different modes of a multimode fiber and comparing the numerical results with those obtained by solving the full stochastic equations. The agreement is excellent in all cases studied. A major benefit of the new Manakov equations is that they typically reduce the computation time by more than a factor of 10. Our results show that birefringence fluctuations improve system performance by reducing the impact of fiber nonlinearities. The extent of improvement depends on the fiber design and how many spatial modes are used for SDM transmission. We also consider the case where all spatial modes experience strong random linear coupling modeled using a random matrix. We derive new Manakov equations in this regime and show that the impact of some nonlinear effects can be reduced relatively to single-modes fibers. Finally, we extend our analysis to multicore fibers and show that the Manakov equations obtained in the strong- and weak-coupling regimes can still be used depending on the extent of coupling among fiber cores.

We study the effects of two-photon absorption on the self-phase modulation (SPM) process in silicon waveguides while including both free-carrier absorption and free-carrier dispersion. An analytical solution is provided in the case in which the density of generated carriers is relatively low; it is useful for estimating spectral bandwidth of pulses at low repetition rates. The free-carrier effects are studied numerically with emphasis on their role on the nonlinear phase shift and spectral broadening. We also consider how the repetition rate of a pulse train affects the SPM process.