Confining metallic gallium - new material structure for optical data processing at milliwatt power level

Abstract

We report the application of a recently discovered huge optical nonlinearity of gallium/dielectric interface in controlling light with light. The nonlinearity is associated with a light-induced, reversible and very fast structural phase transition between solid alpha-gallium and metastable phase of much higher reflectivity. The material is fully compatible with existing telecom fiber technology as the gallium structure can be manufactured on the tip of an optical fiber or can form a wall of a planar optical waveguide. It and can be used with lasers operating anywhere from 400nm to 1.7mkm. We have demonstrated a fully fiberized high contrast all-optical gate based on this material which operates at only a few milliwatts of light power. The gate performance has been characterized with diode lasers operating at telecom wavelengths of 155mkm, 1.3mkm and 670nm
The gate is suitable for analog and digital applications and shows useful modulation at frequencies up to 1MHz. The gate can also handle optical pulses as short as 10ns Applications of the new material structure for optical routing, in particular in the WDM technology optical bistability optical data storage, power limiting and controllable power attenuation are discussed
Our demonstrations have shown that photonic devices based on gallium interfaces can be comparable to conventional silicon transistors in terms of speed versus energy consumption.

More information

Identifiers

ORCID for Periklis Petropoulos: orcid.org/0000-0002-1576-8034

ORCID for David J. Richardson: orcid.org/0000-0002-7751-1058

ORCID for Nikolay Zheludev: orcid.org/0000-0002-1013-6636

Catalogue record

Export record