9360816 Nelson The development of a national fiber optic communications network has recently been proposed as an important objective of our overall infrastructure development in order to maintain and improve U.S. competitiveness in high technology. Optical switching will no doubt ply an important role in the functioning of many of the most advanced aspects of this high speed network. In this proposal, Foster-Miller presents a new approach to optically activated switching based on the resonantly-enhanced nonlinear optical switching in rare-earth doped fluoride fibers. Together with our team partners, Dr. Richard Pantell, Director of the Stanford University Ginzton Laboratory and Dr. Paul France of British Telecom Research Laboratories, we will experimentally demonstrate during Phase I an expected order of magnitude improvement in performance of the fluoride fiber based switch over previous experiments. We project that with the known properties of doped fluoride fibers, we will be able to both lower the required pump power and reduce the interaction length to produce a compact and low power all-fiber switch. During Phase II we will design, fabricate, test and deliver very high speed all-fiber switches for use in optical matrix applications, optical computing and optical interconnects, local area networks and telecommunications. ***
