All-optical supercontinuum switching

Oliver Melchert, Carsten Brée, Ayhan Tajalli, Alexander Pape, Rostislav Arkhipov, Stephanie Willms, Ihar Babushkin, Dmitry Skryabin, Günter Steinmeyer, Uwe Morgner, Ayhan Demircan

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

22 Citations (SciVal)

Abstract

Efficient all-optical switching is a challenging task as photons are bosons and cannot immediately interact with each other. Consequently, one has to resort to nonlinear optical interactions, with the Kerr gate being the classical example. However, the latter requires strong pulses to switch weaker ones. Numerous approaches have been investigated to overcome the resulting lack of fan-out capability of all-optical switches, most of which relied on types of resonant enhancement of light-matter interaction. Here we experimentally demonstrate a novel approach that utilizes switching between different portions of soliton fission induced supercontinua, exploiting an optical event horizon. This concept enables a high switching efficiency and contrast in a dissipation free setting. Our approach enables fan-out, does not require critical biasing, and is at least partially cascadable. Controlling complex soliton dynamics paves the way towards building all-optical logic gates with advanced functionalities.

Original languageEnglish
Article number146
JournalCommunications Physics
Volume3
Issue number1
Early online date21 Aug 2020
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Dec 2020

Funding

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) (project MO 850-19/2), Germany’s Excellence Strategy within the Cluster Excellence PhoenixD (EXC 2122, Project ID 390833453). R.A. thanks Russian Science Foundation (project 19-72-00012) for the financial support. We acknowledge support by the Open Access Publication Fund of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Open access funding provided by Projekt DEAL.

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General Physics and Astronomy

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