Materials and Processing requirements for Efficient Fiber Optic Nonlinear Devices

Nonlinear optics in an optical fiber can be used to make a variety of devices for the amplification or control of light. What keeps these devices out of the realm of practical application is the need for new materials and improvements in the guiding geometry itself. Nonlinear optics involves the mixing of optical beams over some interaction length. It is this interaction length which can be increased by several orders of magnitude when the nonlinear interactions occur in an optical fiber.