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Optics Letters

Optical bistability from a thermodynamic phase transition in vanadium dioxide

R. S. Rana, F. A. Chudnovskiǐ, David D. Nolte

Published Oct 1, 1992• 21 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We demonstrate cw optical bistability at 1.06 μm using the large thermo-optical nonlinearity from the metal-semiconductor phase transition in a thin-film interference filter of vanadium dioxide. Highly stable and reproducible operation has been obtained. By biasing at the transition point, an all-optical external switching between the semiconducting and the metallic states has been demonstrated, with a contrast ratio of 15:1. The effective nonlinear index coefficient is n2 ≈ 1.6 cm2/W with a switching energy density of 135 pJ/μm2 and a speed of 15 ms. The tunability of the material properties of vanadium dioxide provides a means to make devices with a wide range of switching powers and speeds.

DOI
10.1364/ol.17.001385

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We demonstrate cw optical bistability at 1.06 μm using the large thermo-optical nonlinearity from the metal-semiconductor phase transition in a thin-film interference filter of vanadium dioxide. Highly stable and reproducible operation has been obtained. By biasing at the transition point, an all-optical external switching between the semiconducting and the metallic states has been demonstrated, with a contrast ratio of 15:1. The effective nonlinear index coefficient is n2 ≈ 1.6 cm2/W with a switching energy density of 135 pJ/μm2 and a speed of 15 ms. The tunability of the material properties of vanadium dioxide provides a means to make devices with a wide range of switching powers and speeds.
In this work, we theoretically investigate optical bistability and optical response of a hybrid system consisting of semiconductor quantum dot (SQD) coupled with a vanadium dioxide nanoparticle (VO2NP) in the infrared (IR) regime. The VO2 material exists in semiconductor and metallic phases below and above the critical temperature, respectively where the particle optical properties dramatically change during this phase transition. In our calculations a filling fraction factor controls the VO2NP phase transition when the hybrid system interacts with a laser field. We demonstrate that the switch-up threshold for optical bistability is strongly controlled by filling fraction without changing the structure of the hybrid system. Also, it is shown that, the threshold of optical bistability increases when the VO2NP phases changes from semiconductor to metallic phase. The presented results have the potential to be applied in designing optical switching and optical storage.
We report the realisation of optically bistable switching and memory elements, and the transphasor Can all-optical transistor) in simple one element nonlinear Fabry-Perot interferometers made from the semiconductor InSb. These devices, which operate at 5 K and 77 K with mW powers from a cw CO laser between 5 and 6 μm rely on a strongly intensity-dependent refractive index discovered near the bandgap region of InSb and explained by bandgap resonant saturation. Switching speeds are shown to be < 500 ns in these first devices and operation to much shorter timescales is predicted. Operation at room temperature and in other semiconductors at other wavelengths remains a possibility and such devices offer considerable potential for all-optical switching in integrated optics and laser pulse control.
Quantum interference can produce pivotal effective photon-photon interactions, enabling the exploration of various quantum information technologies that are beyond the possibilities of classical physics. While this effective interaction is fundamentally limited to the bosonic nature of photons and the restricted phase responses from commonly used unitary optical elements, loss-induced nonunitary operations provide an alternative degree of freedom to control quantum interference. Here, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a concise yet powerful tool to unravel the essential features of quantum interference based on the phase change material vanadium dioxide. Since the insulator-metal transition in an elaborate vanadium dioxide thin film can create any desired particle exchange phase response, harnessing its phase transition would allow the dynamical control of photon-photon interaction such that the conventional coalescence and the anomalous anti-coalescence of photons can be continuously tuned. These results highlight an alternative approach for investigating quantum light-matter interactions, and facilitate nonunitary quantum interference for various quantum information processing tasks.