Optical half-adder and half-subtracter employing the Pockels effect.

The Pockels effect in periodically poled lithium niobate made it possible to switch optical signals between two orthogonal optical linear polarizations of the vertical and horizontal polarization states. Based on this effect, we demonstrated polarization-based binary optical logic gates: AND, and OR gates. By combining these basic gates with other polarization-based optical logic gates such as XOR gate accomplished in our previous researches, half-adder and half-subtracter of digital signals with a high extinction ratio of about 10dB have been demonstrated in our experiment, which made it possible to run more complex logical calculus.