Novel aersol techniques for the fabrication of optical lightguides have been developed in the Laboratory for Lightwave Technology. These represent a new way to fabricate multicomponent glasses. These techniques to develop optical fibers for second harmonic generation, and for fibers that exhibit high values of the third-order nonlinear susceptibility. These latter fibers may well play a role in nonlinear Fabry-Perot devices related to ultra-fast soliton switching. Also studied will be the effects of electric field induced anisotropies on the optical properties of optical fibers. This will be accomplished by polling fibers doped with polarizable ions near the glass transition temperature and subsequently cooling with the field applied to freeze in these material anisotropies.
