Ultra Low-Power All-Optical Switching

One of the challenges of the modern photonics is to develop all-optical devices enabling increased speed and energy efficiency for transmitting and processing information on an optical chip. It is believed that the recently suggested Parity-Time (PT) symmetric photonic systems with alternating regions of gain and loss can bring novel functionalities. In such systems, losses are as important as gain and, depending on the structural parameters, gain compensates losses. Generall...

We propose and demonstrate hybrid all-optical switching devices that combine silicon nanocavities and two-dimensional semiconductor material. By exploiting the refractive index modulation caused by photo-induced carriers in the two-dimensional material instead of the silicon substrate, we overcome the switching performance limitation imposed by the substrate material. Air-mode photonic crystal nanobeam cavities capable of efficient interaction with two-dimensional materials a...

Miniaturized and rationally assembled nanostructures exhibit extraordinarily distinct physical properties beyond their individual units. This review will focus on structured small-scale optical cavities that show unique electromagnetic near fields and collective optical coupling. By harnessing different material systems and structural designs, various light-matter interactions can be engineered, such as nanoscale lasing, nonlinear optics, exciton-polariton coupling, and energ...

We demonstrate ultrafast soliton-based nonlinear balancing of dual-core asymmetry in highly nonlinear photonic crystal fiber at sub-nanojoule pulse energy level. The effect of fiber asymmetry was studied experimentally by selective excitation and monitoring of individual fiber cores at different wavelengths between 1500 nm and 1800 nm. Higher energy transfer rate to non-excited core was observed in the case of fast core excitation due to nonlinear asymmetry balancing of tempo...

Two-dimensional photonic crystal membranes provide a versatile planar architecture for integrated photonics to control the propagation of light on a chip employing high quality optical cavities, waveguides, beamsplitters or dispersive elements. When combined with highly non-linear quantum emitters, quantum photonic networks operating at the single photon level come within reach. Towards large-scale quantum photonic networks, selective dynamic control of individual components ...

We study dynamics of the interaction between two weak light beams mediated by a strongly coupled quantum dot-photonic crystal cavity system. First, we perform all optical switching of a weak continuous-wave signal with a pulsed control beam, and then perform switching between two pulsed beams (40ps pulses) at the single photon level. Our results show that the quantum dot-nanocavity system creates strong, controllable interactions at the single photon level.

We develop an all-integrated optoelectromechanical system that operates in the superhigh frequency band. This system is based on an ultrahigh-Q slotted photonic crystal (PhC) nanocavity formed by two PhC membranes, one of which is patterned with electrode and capacitively driven. The strong simultaneous electromechanical and optomechanical interactions yield efficient electrical excitation and sensitive optical transduction of the bulk acoustic modes of the PhC membrane. Thes...

Phase changing materials (PCM) are widely used for optical data recording, sensing, all-optical switching, and optical limiting. Our focus here is on the case when the change in the transmission characteristics of the optical material is caused by the input light itself. Specifically, the light-induced heating triggers the phase transition in the PCM. In this paper, using a numerical example, we demonstrate that incorporating the PCM in a photonic structure can lead to a dram...

By numerically integrating the three-dimensional Maxwell equations in the time domain with reference to a dispersive quadratically nonlinear material, we study second harmonic generation in planar photonic crystal microresonators. The proposed scheme allows efficient coupling of the pump radiation to the defect resonant mode. The out-coupled generated second harmonic is maximized by impedance matching the photonic crystal cavity to the output waveguide.

Ultrafast control of light-matter interactions constitutes a crucial feature in view of new technological frontiers of information processing. However, conventional optical elements are either static or feature switching speeds that are extremely low with respect to the timescales at which it is possible to control light. Here, we exploit high-quality-factor engineered epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) modes of a metal-insulator-metal nanocavity to realize an all-optical ultrafast modu...