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Physical Review B

Physical origin of the ultrafast response of nonlinear photonic crystal atoms to the excitation of ultrashort pulses

Sheng Lan, Xiongwen Chen, Jing-Dong Chen, Xu-Sheng Lin

Published Mar 23, 2005• 8 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The physical origin of the ultrafast response of nonlinear photonic crystal (PC) atoms to the excitation of ultrashort pulses is investigated in detail. It is found that the dynamic shift of PC defect modes is responsible for the dramatic shortening of the photon lifetime in nonlinear PC atoms. The transmission spectra for nonlinear PC atoms that resulted from the dynamic shift are calculated and they are in good agreement with the simulation results.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.71.125122

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The physical origin of the ultrafast response of nonlinear photonic crystal (PC) atoms to the excitation of ultrashort pulses is investigated in detail. It is found that the dynamic shift of PC defect modes is responsible for the dramatic shortening of the photon lifetime in nonlinear PC atoms. The transmission spectra for nonlinear PC atoms that resulted from the dynamic shift are calculated and they are in good agreement with the simulation results.
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.
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.
We demonstrate ultrafast delay tuning of a slow-light pulse with a response time <10 ps. This is achieved using two types of slow light: dispersion-compensated slow light for the signal pulse, and low-dispersion slow light to enhance nonlinear effects of the control pulse. These two types of slow light are generated simultaneously in Si lattice-shifted photonic crystal waveguides, arising from flat and straight photonic bands, respectively. The control pulse blueshifts the signal pulse spectrum, through dynamic tuning caused by the plasma effect of two-photon-absorption-induced carriers. This changes the delay by up to 10 ps only when the two pulses overlap within the waveguide and enables ultrafast tuning that is not limited by the carrier lifetime. Using this, we succeeded in tuning the delay of one target pulse within a pulse train with 12 ps intervals.
The present thesis is devoted to theoretical studies of pulse propagation of light through linear and nonlinear media, and of light-induced nuclear dynamics. The first part of the thesis addresses propagation of light pulses in linear periodical media - photonic crystals. The main accent was put on studies of the angular properties of two qualitatively different types of photonic crystals: holographic photonic crystals, and impurity band based photonic crystals. The anisotropy of band structure, group velocity and pulse delay with respect to the light polarization are analyzed. In the second part of the thesis a strict theory of nonlinear propagation of a few strong interacting light beams is presented. The key idea of this approach is a self-consistent solution of the nonlinear wave equation and the density matrix equations of the material. This technique is applied to studies of dynamics of cavityless lasing generated by ultra-fast multi-photon excitation. It is shown that interaction of co- and counter-propagating pulses of amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) affects the dynamics and efficiency of nonlinear conversion. Our dynamical theory allows to explain the asymmetric spectral properties of the forward and backward ASE pulses, which were observed in recent experiment with different dye molecules. It is shown that the ASE spectral profile changes drastically when the pump intensity approaches the threshold level. The effect of the temporal self-pulsation of ASE is studied in detail. The third part of the thesis is devoted to light-induced nuclear dynamics. Time- and frequency-resolved X-ray spectroscopy of molecules driven by strong and coherent infrared (IR) pulses shows that the phase of the IR field strongly influences the trajectory of the nuclear wave packet, and hence, the X-ray spectrum. Such a dependence arises due to the interference of one (X-ray) and two-photon (X-ray + IR) excitation channels. The phase of the light influences the dynamics also when the Rabi frequency approaches the vibrational frequency, breaking down the rotating-wave approximation. The probe X-ray spectra are also sensitive to the delay time, the duration, and the shape of the pulses. The evolution of the nuclear wave packets in the dissociative core-excited state affects the dynamics of resonant Auger scattering from fixed-in-space molecules. One of the important dynamical effects is the atomic-like resonance which experiences electronic Doppler shift. We predict that the scattering of the Auger electrons by nearby atoms leads to new Doppler shifted resonances. These extra resonances show sharp maxima in the bond directions, which makes them very promising as probes for local molecular structure using energy and angular resolved electron-ion coincidence techniques. Our theory provides prediction of several new effects, but also results that are in good agreement with the available experimental data.
We experimentally and theoretically investigate the nonlinear electromagnetic properties of a microstrip photonic crystal (PC) cavity with embedded electromagnetic-induced-transparency (EIT)-like meta-atoms. A bistable response, with threshold of low to −6.1 dBm and the transmission contrast of up to 4.0 dB, is conceptually demonstrated with a varactor as the nonlinear medium inclusion. Such low-threshold and high-contrast transmission action comes from the composite PC-EIT mechanism, which possesses sharper features and stronger localization of the electromagnetic field than either PC cavity or EIT-like meta-atoms. This mechanism will be useful for all-optical signal processing with advanced materials.