Ultrasmall optical memory

Masaya Notomi, Takasumi Tanabe, Eiichi Kuramochi +2 more

Recent progress in ultrahigh-Q and ultrasmall cavities based on photonic-crystal slabs have impacts on various phenomena. We report our recent investigations of all-optical bistable switching/memory action toward all-optical logic, and novel adiabatic tuning phenomena (wavelength conversion, opto-mechanical energy conversion, and photon dynamic memory).

James Vinton Burt

Gino Priem, Pieter Dumon, Wim Bogaerts +3 more

We investigate the significance of secondary effects caused by free carrier accumulation and subsequent heating on the nonlinear behaviour of ultrasmall Silicon-On-Insulator ring resonators. All-optical bistability based on thermal dispersion was experimentally obtained for an input power of only 0.28mW. At higher powers, pulsating behaviour was observed which is problematic for the stability of thermal memory and switching operations. Using free carrier dispersion, we also demonstrate all-optical wavelength conversion with a pulse length of 10 ns, indicating that bitrates of 0.1 Gb/s are feasible. Also here, the presence of unstable pulsations was observed, leading to significant errors in the converted data pattern.

Abdul Salim Maizon

Masaya Notomi, Takasumi Tanabe, Akihiko Shinya +4 more

This article overviews our recent studies of ultrahigh-Q and ultrasmall photonic-crystal cavities, and their applications to nonlinear optical processing and novel adiabatic control of light. First, we show our latest achievements of ultrahigh-Q photonic-crystal nanocavities, and present extreme slow-light demonstration. Next, we show all-optical bistable switching and memory operations based on enhanced optical nonlinearity in these nanocavities with extremely low power, and discuss their applicability for realizing chip-scale all-optical logic, such as flip-flop. Finally, we introduce adiabatic tuning of high-Q nanocavities, which leads to novel wavelength conversion and another type of optical memories.