A Unified Materials Approach To Mitigating Optical Nonlinearities In Optical Fibre. I. Thermodynamics Of Optical Scattering

Sustained progress in the development of optical fibres has led to the present state where further improvements in performance are limited by intrinsic optical nonlinearities. In order to circumvent such limitation,s the user community has adopted two general approaches: (i) engineer the enabled systems accordingly; and/or (ii) microstructure the fibre to shift nonlinear thresholds to high optical power levels. In both cases, the nonlinearities are accepted as they are and performance is enhanced through added system or fibre design complexity. This is the first paper in a series of three.