Fundamental limitations to gain enhancement in periodic media and waveguides.

A common strategy to compensate for losses in optical nanostructures is to add gain material in the system. By exploiting slow-light effects it is expected that the gain may be enhanced beyond its bulk value. Here we show that this route cannot be followed uncritically: inclusion of gain inevitably modifies the underlying dispersion law, and thereby may degrade the slow-light properties underlying the device operation and the anticipated gain enhancement itself.

Slow-light enhanced absorption in a hollow-core fiber.

Light traversing a hollow-core photonic band-gap fiber may experience multiple reflections and thereby a slow-down and enhanced optical path length. This offers a technologically interesting way of increasing the optical absorption of an otherwise weakly absorbing material which can infiltrate the fibre. However, in contrast to structures with a refractive index that varies along the propagation direction, like Bragg stacks, the translationally invariant structures studied here feature an intrinsic trade-off between light slow-down and filling fraction that limits the net absorption enhancement.