An all-optical, non-volatile, bidirectional, phase-change meta-switch

Gholipour, Behrad, Zhang, Jianfa, MacDonald, Kevin F., Hewak, Daniel W. and Zheludev, Nikolay I. (2013) An all-optical, non-volatile, bidirectional, phase-change meta-switch. Advanced Materials, 25 (22), 3050-3054. (doi:10.1002/adma.201300588).

Abstract

Today's telecommunications networks are still largely optically opaque - consisting of electronic nodes connected by point-to-point optical links, relying on a series of optical-electrical conversions. Moving to all-optical switching will allow increased bit rates and low latency movement of data, providing greater routing agility, reducing energy requirements and simplifying network structures. This promise, and indeed the fact that the fundamental capacity limits of existing infrastructure are being reached, has sparked renewed interest in the extension of telecommunications bands to longer infrared wavelengths (where lower intrinsic losses in fibre media are possible) and intense efforts to develop techniques based on space-division multiplexing (in which many distinguishable data paths are established through the same fibre strand using either multiple cores or a multimode core) to substantially increase capacity. Future network architectures will require a new generation of highly integrated devices capable of functions such as all-optical switching and mode (de)multiplexing. We report here on the proof-of-principle demonstration of a non-volatile all-optical switch that combines the chalcogenide glass phase-change medium widely used in rewritable optical disks with nanostructured plasmonic metamaterials to yield a high-contrast, large area, reversible switching solution that may be optimised to function across a broad infrared band.

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Contributors

Author: Kevin F. MacDonald

Author: Daniel W. Hewak

Author: Nikolay I. Zheludev

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