Optical pulse propagation in transverse Anderson localization optical fibers*

We study the optical pulse propagation in transverse Anderson localization optical fibers (TALOFs). TALOFs are a novel class of optical fibers that guide light, not in a conventional core-cladding setting, but by means of Anderson localization, where any location across the transverse profile of the fiber can be used to guide light. In particular, we investigate the group velocity distribution of guided modes in TALOFs. We observe that the narrowest distribution of group velocities is obtained in the presence of a small amount of disorder; therefore, the modal dispersion of an optical pulse is minimized when there is only a slight disorder in TALOF. Our investigation is primarily aimed at the nonlinear optical properties of TALOFs, but the results can apply to the usage of TALOFs in optical communications as well. We will also discuss other nonlinear behavior of TALOFs, e.g., four-wave-mixing and heralded single-photon generation for quantum information processing.

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