Buffering and trapping ultrashort optical pulses in concatenated Bragg gratings

Strong retardation of ultrashort optical pulses, including their deceleration and stoppage in the form of Bragg solitons in a cascaded Bragg grating (BG) structure, is proposed. The manipulations of the pulses are carried out, using nonlinear effects, in a chirped BG segment which is linked, via a defect, to a uniform grating. The storage of the ultrashort pulses is shown to be very robust with respect to variations of the input field intensity, suggesting the feasibility of storing ultrafast optical pulses in such a structure. Physical estimates are produced for the BGs written in silicon.