We fabricated ultrafast nonlinear optical films of squarylium J-aggregates and studied their properties including the absorption spectrum, the refractive index, the third-order nonlinear optical coefficients, the extent of absorption saturation, and the recovery of absorption saturation. The transmittance of the film was increased by 30% due to absorption saturation at a pump energy of several hundreds fJ/µm2/pulse. The half decay time constant of absorption saturation was found to be approximately 100 fs for off-resonant excitation. Two-dimensional demultiplexing was demonstrated using the squarylium film as a switching material. From a train of 8 optical pulses with 100 fs duration and 1 ps interval corresponding to a bit rate of 1 Tbps, 24 spatially resolved spots were obained.

We investigate the engineering of the impurity bands in photonic crystals (PCs) for realizing high-efficiency wave guiding, all-optical switching and optical delay for ultrashort optical pulses. It is found that quasi-flat impurity bands suitable for the transmission of ultrashort pulses can be achieved by properly controlling the configuration of coupled cavity waveguides (CCWs). At sharp corners, high bending efficiency is obtained over the entire impurity band. All-optical switching can be realized by creating a dynamical band gap at the center of an impurity band. The concentration of electromagnetic wave at defect regions leads to high switching efficiency while the tunable feature of PC defects makes all-optical control possible. It is also revealed that CCWs with quasi-flat impurity bands provide efficient group delay for ultrashort pulses with negligible attenuation and distortion. From the viewpoint of practical fabrication, the effect of disorder on the transmission property of impurity bands is discussed and the criterion for localization transition is determined.

RF under sampling is more suitable for Satellite receiver systems in comparison to terrestrial systems. In conventional RF under sampling the minimum sampling frequency (fs) should be atleast twice the system bandwidth; therefore for a system with a wide bandwidth, a relatively high fs is necessary. In this paper we propose a direct RF under sampling reception method that halves fs. The proposed f's is achieved by folding in band noise in half. A method of adapting f's for the reception of signals in different channels is also proposed; this ensures that the SNR is not degraded for any channel. To evaluate the proposed technique's performance and compare it to the conventional case a 3 channel, 1 GHz band test receiver and it's key device (i.e. S/H circuit) are developed. Using SNR and EVM as performance indexes, the performance of the proposed technique has been evaluated and compared to that of the conventional technique. The evaluation results show that the proposed technique can achieve the same performance as conventional RF under sampling for all 3 channels, using only half of the sampling frequency of the conventional technique.

Principle of a single shot demultiplextion by means of time-to-space conversion was investigated using femtosecond nonlinear optical response of absorption bleaching of squarylium dye (SQ) J-aggregates. Spincoated films of squarylium dye J-aggregates on glass substrates exhibit efficient and ultrafast transmittance change, which recovers 73% of its initial level (0 fs) within 1 ps. A simple method for time-to-space conversion was applied for this film. We took our attention to one of the characteristics of femtosecond pulse, which is the spatial thinness in its propagation direction. Femtosecond pulses of a single pump pulse and train of four probe pulses were illuminated to the same area (diameter of 10 mm) of the surface of the SQ J-aggregates film. Direction of the probe beam was normal to the surface of the film and that of the pump beam was oblique angle in horizontal plane. Caused by spatial delay of a pump pulse due to the illumination in oblique angle to the film, four probe pulses with interval time of 1 ps (1 THz) meet separate places on the film. Because of the fast response of the SQ J-aggregates, the film picked out part of each probe pulse, which has narrower shapes in horizontal direction compared to the initial circular one by transmittance change of the film. The spatially separated four lines were observed by a CCD camera for an image of the transmitted probe pulse train. These results suggest that the response time of SQ J-aggregate film, which determines the horizontal width of each line, to be enough for demultiplexing of 1 THz optical signals.