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Applied Physics Letters

Ultrafast response of photonic crystal atoms with Kerr nonlinearity to ultrashort optical pulses

Sheng Lan, Venu Gopal Achanta, Kyozo Kanamoto, Hiroshi Ishikawa

Published Jun 18, 2004• 24 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We investigate the response of photonic crystal (PC) atoms with Kerr nonlinearity to the excitation of ultrashort optical pulses. Surprisingly, it is found that PC atoms with sharp resonant peaks in frequency spectrum (or with large quality factors) can respond to ultrashort pulses very rapidly when Kerr nonlinearity is introduced. More interestingly, the response time under high-power densities can be even shorter than the duration of the pump pulse. It is revealed that the nonlinearity induced broadening of dynamical frequency spectrum is responsible for the ultrafast response time, implying the possibility of ultrafast all-optical switching.

DOI
10.1063/1.1764603

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We investigate the response of photonic crystal (PC) atoms with Kerr nonlinearity to the excitation of ultrashort optical pulses. Surprisingly, it is found that PC atoms with sharp resonant peaks in frequency spectrum (or with large quality factors) can respond to ultrashort pulses very rapidly when Kerr nonlinearity is introduced. More interestingly, the response time under high-power densities can be even shorter than the duration of the pump pulse. It is revealed that the nonlinearity induced broadening of dynamical frequency spectrum is responsible for the ultrafast response time, implying the possibility of ultrafast all-optical switching.
Ultrashort light pulses propagating through a resonant photonic crystal can be reshaped to shorter duration output through self-induced transparency. The reshaping process is shown to result from the unique transmission behavior of light pulses through the photonic structure. Pulse compression and pulse merging, with which multipeak optical pulses can be evolved to give rise to a single-peak, high-quality transmitted pulse output, are obtained. The pulse propagation in a resonant photonic crystal is compared with that in a bulk atomic medium, which shows that the effect of pulse reshaping is much more powerful in the former than in the latter.
Effect of relaxation time on the performance of photonic crystal optical bistable switches based on Kerr nolinearity is discussed. This paper deals with optical pulses with the duration of about 50 ps. In such cases the steady state response of the optical device can be used to approximate the pulse evolution if the nonlinearity is assumed instantaneous, hence analytical solutions such as the coupled mode theory can be used to obtain the time evolution of the electromagnetic fields. However if the relaxation time of the material nonlinear response is also considered, changes in the power levels and in the shape of the hystersis loop is observed. In this case, we use the nonlinear finite difference time domain method (NL-FDTD) to follow the system dynamics and get the bistability hystersis loop. Codes are developed to analyze the instantaneous Kerr materials and the Kerr materials with finite response times. Depending on the material, the relaxation times of the order of 1-10fs should be considered in studying bistability to obtain the right shape of the output pulses. It is observed that the relaxation leads to larger input power and threshold and hence degrades the performance of the switch in pulse shaping.
We investigate the dynamics of nonlinear photonic crystal (PC) atoms by use of numerical simulations in a pump-probe scheme based on a finite-difference time-domain technique. A two-dimensional nonlinear PC atom with multimode is intentionally employed for the numerical simulations. The use of the multimode PC atom makes it possible that the pump and probe waves are set at different frequencies, ensuring the clear identification of the dynamics of the nonlinear PC atom. The physical model for the dynamics of nonlinear PC atoms has been established and very good agreement between the analytical and simulation results has been achieved.