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Opto-Canada: SPIE Regional Meeting on Optoelectronics, Photonics, and Imaging

Photonic band gap materials: towards an all-optical transistor

Marian Florescu A

Published Aug 29, 2017• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The transmission of information as optical signals encoded on light waves traveling through optical fibers and optical networks is increasingly moving to shorter and shorter distance scales. In the near future, optical networking is poised to supersede conventional transmission over electric wires and electronic networks for computer-to-computer communications, chip-to-chip communications, and even on-chip communications. The ever-increasing demand for faster and more reliable devices to process the optical signals offers new opportunities in developing all-optical signal processing systems (systems in which one optical signal controls another, thereby adding "intelligence" to the optical networks). All-optical switches, two-state and many-state all-optical memories, all-optical limiters, all-optical discriminators and all-optical transistors are only a few of the many devices proposed during the last two decades. The "all-optical" label is commonly used to distinguish the devices that do not involve dissipative electronic transport and require essentially no electrical communication of information. The all-optical transistor action was first observed in the context of optical bistability [1] and consists in a strong differential gain regime, in which, for small variations in the input intensity, the output intensity has a very strong variation. This analog operation is for all-optical input what transistor action is for electrical inputs.

DOI
10.1117/12.2283852

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The transmission of information as optical signals encoded on light waves traveling through optical fibers and optical networks is increasingly moving to shorter and shorter distance scales. In the near future, optical networking is poised to supersede conventional transmission over electric wires and electronic networks for computer-to-computer communications, chip-to-chip communications, and even on-chip communications. The ever-increasing demand for faster and more reliable devices to process the optical signals offers new opportunities in developing all-optical signal processing systems (systems in which one optical signal controls another, thereby adding "intelligence" to the optical networks). All-optical switches, two-state and many-state all-optical memories, all-optical limiters, all-optical discriminators and all-optical transistors are only a few of the many devices proposed during the last two decades. The "all-optical" label is commonly used to distinguish the devices that do not involve dissipative electronic transport and require essentially no electrical communication of information. The all-optical transistor action was first observed in the context of optical bistability [1] and consists in a strong differential gain regime, in which, for small variations in the input intensity, the output intensity has a very strong variation. This analog operation is for all-optical input what transistor action is for electrical inputs.
We describe all-optical transistor action in photonic band gap materials doped with active atoms. In the presence of a photonic band gap (PBG) material, a coherent laser beam with the frequency slightly detuned from the resonant atomic transition frequency can drive a collection of two-level atoms to an almost totally inverted state, a phenomenon strictly forbidden in ordinary vacuum. By changing the laser field intensity in the neighborhood of a threshold value, it is possible to drive the atomic system through a transition from states in which the atoms populate preferentially the ground level to almost totally inverted states. In this process, the atomic system switches from a passive medium (highly absorptive) to a active medium (highly amplifying). The switching action in a PBG material is not associated with operating near a narrow cavity resonance with conventional trade-off between switching time and switching threshold intensity. Rather it is associated with an abrupt discontinuity in the engineered broad band electromagnetic density of states of the PBG material. We demonstrate all-optical transistor action in PBG materials by analyzing the absorption spectrum of a second probe laser beam and we show that the probe beam experience a substantial differential gain by slight intensity modulations in the control laser field.
We describe all-optical transistor action in photonic bandgap (PBG) materials doped with active atoms and analyse the advantages of this system over other all-optical transistor proposals. In the presence of a PBG material, a coherent laser beam with the frequency slightly detuned from the resonant atomic transition frequency can drive a collection of two-level atoms to an almost totally inverted state, a phenomenon strictly forbidden in ordinary vacuum. By varying the laser field intensity in the neighbourhood of a threshold value, it is possible to drive the atomic system through a transition from states in which the atoms populate preferentially the ground level to almost totally inverted states. In this process, the atomic system switches from a passive medium (highly absorptive) to a active medium (highly amplifying). The large differential gain exhibited by the atomic medium is very robust with respect to nonradiative relaxation and dephasing mechanisms. The switching action in a PBG material is not associated with operation near a narrow cavity resonance with conventional trade-off between switching time and switching threshold intensity. Rather it is associated with an abrupt discontinuity in the engineered broad-band electromagnetic density of states of the PBG material. We demonstrate all-optical transistor action in PBG materials by analysing the absorption spectrum of a second probe laser beam and we show that the probe beam experiences a substantial differential gain by slight intensity modulations in the control laser field. Under certain conditions, the fluctuations in the number of totally inverted atoms that contribute to the amplification process are strongly diminished (the statistics of the excited atoms becomes sub-Poissonian), which, in turn, determines a very low-noise regime of amplification.
Summary form only given. Photonic band gap (PBG) materials are a new class of dielectrics which represent a major new frontier in quantum, nonlinear, and classical optics. They also represent a new technology platform for the optical networking industry. Unlike semiconductors which facilitate the coherent propagation of electrons, PBG materials execute their novel functions through the coherent localization of photons. When a PBG material is doped with impurity atoms (or other two-level systems) which have an electronic transition that lies within the gap, spontaneous emission of light from the atom is inhibited. Instead, the photon forms a bound state to the atom. This has dramatic consequences for collective light emission from a large number of atoms and for the interaction of such atoms with an external laser field. I describe the design of an all optical micro-transistor based on collective switching of two-level atoms near a photonic band edge, by an external laser field. I discuss tunable PBG materials whose band structure can be modulated by means of an external field. This effect enables the steering of light in a manner similar to the steering of electrons by an electric field in a semiconductor.
Optical disk memory, optical fiber communication systems, and photolithography are examples of success in photonics. In the case of optical disk memory, storage and readout of the pit size smaller than λ/NA are not possible, where λ and NA are the wavelength of the incident light and a numerical aperture of the focusing lens, respectively. Shorter-wavelength lasers have been intensively developed in order to decrease the diffraction-limited pit size, i.e., the major efforts of increasing storage density have been how to use the shorter-wavelength light for storage and readout. However, the upper limit of the storage density to be realized by using visible light is several 10 Gb/in.2, while the value to be required in the year 2010 is 1 Tb/in.2. Semiconductor lasers, optical waveguides, and optical switching devices have to confine the light in their bodies for effective operations. In the case of a semiconductor laser, its active layer has to be larger than the diffraction-limited volumes, i.e., λ3, for this confinement. In the case of an optical fiber, its core diameter has to be larger than λ. These examples mean that the sizes of photonic devices cannot be smaller than the wavelength of light, which is the diffraction-limited size of the photonic device. However, sizes of photonic switching devices for the optical fiber communication system in the year 2015 must become smaller than the diffraction-limited ones. The most narrow linewidth of the pattern fabricated by photolithography is also limited by diffraction. Progress in decreasing the patterned size has been the result of the effort of using shorter-wavelength light for decreasing the diffraction-limited value. However, further shortening of the wavelength requires gigantic and expensive light sources, which can prohibit developing practical microfabrication systems. For the visible light sources, the 30–70-nm linewidth for 64–256 GbDRAMs is far beyond the diffraction limit. To summarize, the society of the twenty-first century requires a novel optical technology in order to realize measurement, fabrication, control, and function with the size of several tens of nanometers. However, such miniaturization of optical technology is not possible as long as the conventional propagating light is used. This is the bottleneck imposed by light diffraction. One must go beyond the diffraction limit in order to open a new field of optical technology; this field is called as “nanophotonics.”
Optical transistor is a device used to amplify and switch optical signals. Many researchers focus on replacing current computer components with optical equivalents, resulting in an optical digital computer system processing binary data. Electronic transistor is the fundamental building block of modern electronic devices. To replace electronic components with optical ones, an equivalent optical transistor is required. Here we compare the behavior of an optical transistor with the reflection from a photonic band gap structure in an electromagnetically induced transparency medium. A control signal is used to modulate the photonic band gap structure. Power variation of the control signal is used to provide an analogy between the reflection behavior caused by modulating the photonic band gap structure and the shifting of Q-point (Operation point) as well as amplification function of optical transistor. By means of the control signal, the switching function of optical transistor has also been realized. Such experimental schemes could have potential applications in making optical diode and optical transistor used in quantum information processing.