Large Bandwidth Optical Limiting by Kerr Medium Doped One-Dimensional Coupled Cavity Optical Waveguides

We present a new method to realize large bandwidth optical limiting using Kerr nonlinearity doped one-dimensional coupled cavity optical waveguides (CCOWs). When the incident intensity is weak, the structure is a perfect CCOW that supports a high transmission band. When the intensity is increased, the Kerr effects change the refractive index of the Kerr cavity which results in a large decrease of transmission coefficients in the whole band. We numerically analyse the limiter using the nonlinear transfer matrix method and nonlinear finite difference in time domain method. Optical limiting effects are observed in the whole transmission band, and optimization methods are also discussed.