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Physical Review Letters

Controlling Light by Light with an Optical Event Horizon

Ayhan Demircan, Shalva Amiranashvili, Günter Steinmeyer

Published Apr 18, 2011• 210 citations
Publisher

Abstract

A novel concept for an all-optical transistor is proposed and verified numerically. This concept relies on cross-phase modulation between a signal and a control pulse. Other than previous approaches, the interaction length is extended by temporally locking control and the signal pulse in an optical event horizon, enabling continuous modification of the central wavelength, energy, and duration of a signal pulse by an up to sevenfold weaker control pulse. Moreover, if the signal pulse is a soliton it may maintain its solitonic properties during the switching process. The proposed all-optical switching concept fulfills all criteria for a useful optical transistor in [Nat. Photon. 4, 3 (2010)], in particular, fan-out and cascadability, which have previously proven as the most difficult to meet.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.106.163901

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A novel concept for an all-optical transistor is proposed and verified numerically. This concept relies on cross-phase modulation between a signal and a control pulse. Other than previous approaches, the interaction length is extended by temporally locking control and the signal pulse in an optical event horizon, enabling continuous modification of the central wavelength, energy, and duration of a signal pulse by an up to sevenfold weaker control pulse. Moreover, if the signal pulse is a soliton it may maintain its solitonic properties during the switching process. The proposed all-optical switching concept fulfills all criteria for a useful optical transistor in [Nat. Photon. 4, 3 (2010)], in particular, fan-out and cascadability, which have previously proven as the most difficult to meet.
We show by experiment that scattering of an optical pulse at an optical event horizon provides an unprecedented potential for controlling the properties of a light pulse with another light pulse. Most importantly, with proper parameter selection, a strong pulse can be switched by a 7 times less energetic pulse, which clearly sets our method apart from almost any other previously proposed optical transistor. Moreover, while a gate pulse may experience serious reshaping effects in the normal dispersion regime, a suitably chosen soliton does not dispersively spread or break up into multiple pulses, such that the solitonic switching scheme is cascadable.
The quest for realizing an all-optical transistor while fulfilling desired criteria has been around since long time. Various schemes have been put forward over the years to achieve it; however, almost all techniques make use of at least two different laser sources. Optical event horizon principle has also been employed to see transistor action in glass fibers using two different frequency sources. In this paper, we report an optical transistor action in short-length, tailor-made multimode optical fibers through a single pump only. The higher order mode properties of the fiber and intermodal nonlinear interaction (mainly cross-phase modulation) are used to achieve efficient transistor action. Both the soliton and a weak dispersive pulse are excited in LP02and LP01modes of the fiber, respectively, with a certain temporal delay set by the sign of the differential group delay between the modes. We believe that the scheme has potential to improve system performance owing to the fact that only a single-wavelength pump source is required as opposed to the optical-transistor devices available till date that essentially require two-color pumping.
The optical solitons (temporal and spatial) are very promising for all-optical switching and logic gates due to stability and uniform phase along the pulse. Various schemes have been demonstrated (see, for instance, [1-4]), however in all those schemes the power of the control wave was more or comparable with the power of the signal wave. We propose a scheme where the control wave power is approximately 2-4% of the signal wave power. This scheme is based on the control of the bright spatial soliton interaction.
We demonstrate an all-optical switch that operates at ultra-low-light levels and exhibits several features necessary for use in optical switching networks. An input switching beam, wavelength $\ensuremath{\lambda}$, with an energy density of ${10}^{\ensuremath{-}2}$ photons per optical cross section $[\ensuremath{\sigma}={\ensuremath{\lambda}}^{2}∕(2\ensuremath{\pi})]$ changes the orientation of a two-spot pattern generated via parametric instability in warm rubidium vapor. The instability is induced with less than 1mW1\phantom{\rule{0.3em}{0ex}}\mathrm{mW}1mW of total pump power and generates several $\ensuremath{\mu}\mathrm{Ws}$ of output light. The switch is cascadable: the device output is capable of driving multiple inputs, and exhibits transistor-like signal-level restoration with both saturated and intermediate response regimes. Additionally, the system requires an input power proportional to the inverse of the response time, which suggests thermal dissipation does not necessarily limit the practicality of optical logic devices.
Control an optical “signal” propagating across some channel via a “control” at a gate. The optical signal for this may be as simple as a stream of photons, perhaps at some frequency, and in general the control is also some number of photons. Unfortunately, unlike electrons, photons have very weak non-linear interactions with one another. The concept shown here is only one such method of creating a strong non-linear interaction between photons. The hopeful solution proposed here is to utilize a tight concentration of optical fields in conjunction with guided surface plasmons along a conducting nanowire in order to achieve strong non-linear interactions between optical emitters. Two photons are sent through a nanowire towards an atom, where they collide, such that one photon (red) transfers its information to the other photon. Today the signal is an electrical current. For a quantum computer the signal can be an optical one, and it works using a single photon which is the smallest component of light. To work, the photons have to meet and “talk”, and the photons very rarely interact together” says Anders SØndberg SØrensen who is a Quantum Physicist at the Niels Bohr Institute at Copenhagen University. He explains that light does not function like in Star Wars, where the people fight with light sabres and can cross swords with the light. That is pure fiction and can't happen. When two rays of light meet and cross, the two lights go right through each other. That is called linear optics. What he wants to do with the light is non-linear optics. That means that the photons in the light collide with each other and can affect each other. This is very difficult to do in practice. Photons are so small that one could never hit one with the other. Unless one can control them -and it is this Anders SØrensen has developed a theory about.