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Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics Europe & European Quantum Electronics Conference (CLEO/Europe-EQEC)

Optical bistability in optomechanical metamaterial at sub-milliwatt power levels

Jun‐Yu Ou, Artemios Karvounis, Kevin F. MacDonald, Nikolay I. Zheludev

Published Jun 1, 2017• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Summary form only given. The photonics toolkit includes waveguides, sources, detectors, modulators, etc., but lacks optical memory devices. Natural media with nonlinearities strong enough to show intrinsic bistability do not exist. Here, for the first time we experimentally demonstrate nonlinear nano-opto-mechanical metamaterials exhibiting optical bistability, leading to optical memory operation at sub-milliwatt power levels in the telecoms wavebands.

DOI
10.1109/cleoe-eqec.2017.8087652

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Summary form only given. The photonics toolkit includes waveguides, sources, detectors, modulators, etc., but lacks optical memory devices. Natural media with nonlinearities strong enough to show intrinsic bistability do not exist. Here, for the first time we experimentally demonstrate nonlinear nano-opto-mechanical metamaterials exhibiting optical bistability, leading to optical memory operation at sub-milliwatt power levels in the telecoms wavebands.
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We demonstrate a low power thermally induced optical bistability at telecom wavelengths and room temperature using a nanobeam photonic crystal cavity embedded with an ensemble of quantum dots. The nanobeam photonic crystal cavity is transfer-printed onto the edge of a carrier chip for thermal isolation of the cavity with an efficient optical coupling between the nanobeam waveguide and optical setup. Reflectivity measurements performed with a tunable laser reveal the thermo-optic nature of the nonlinearity. A bistability power threshold as low as 23 μW and an on/off response contrast of 6.02 dB are achieved from a cavity with a moderately low quality factor of 2830. Our device provides optical bistability at power levels an order of magnitude lower than previous quantum-dot-based devices.