Passive fiber ring flip-flop memory based on polarization dynamics

Abstract

Passive fiber ring resonators synchronously pumped by cw trains of ultrashort pulses are shown to exhibit polarization symmetry breaking. Application of this feature to all-optical storage is considered. The proposed storage device operates in the flip-flop mode which makes possible all-optical writing and erasing operations on individual bits. Numerical simulations suggest that a storage capacity of the order of thousand bits could be attainable at bit rates of hundreds of Gb/s with a maximum information processing rate of several Gb/s