Xomalis Angelos, Demirtzioglou Iosif, Plum Eric, Jung Yongmin, Nalla Venkatram, Lacava Cosimo, MacDonald Kevin F, Petropoulos Periklis, Richardson David J, Zheludev Nikolay I
Optoelectronics Research Centre, University of Southampton, Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK.
Centre for Photonic Metamaterials, University of Southampton, Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK.
Nat Commun. 2018 Jan 12;9(1):182. doi: 10.1038/s41467-017-02434-y.
Recently, coherent control of the optical response of thin films in standing waves has attracted considerable attention, ranging from applications in excitation-selective spectroscopy and nonlinear optics to all-optical image processing. Here, we show that integration of metamaterial and optical fibre technologies allows the use of coherently controlled absorption in a fully fiberized and packaged switching metadevice. With this metadevice, which controls light with light in a nanoscale plasmonic metamaterial film on an optical fibre tip, we provide proof-of-principle demonstrations of logical functions XOR, NOT and AND that are performed within a coherent fibre network at wavelengths between 1530 and 1565 nm. The metadevice has been tested at up to 40 gigabits per second and sub-milliwatt power levels. Since coherent absorption can operate at the single-photon level and with 100 THz bandwidth, we argue that the demonstrated all-optical switch concept has potential applications in coherent and quantum information networks.
最近，驻波中薄膜光学响应的相干控制已引起广泛关注，其应用范围涵盖激发选择性光谱学、非线性光学以及全光图像处理等领域。在此，我们展示了超材料与光纤技术的整合，使得在完全光纤化且封装好的开关超器件中能够利用相干控制吸收。借助这种在光纤尖端的纳米级等离子体超材料薄膜中以光控光的超器件，我们提供了异或（XOR）、非（NOT）和与（AND）逻辑功能的原理验证演示，这些逻辑功能在波长为1530至1565纳米的相干光纤网络中执行。该超器件已在高达每秒40吉比特的数据速率和亚毫瓦的功率水平下进行了测试。由于相干吸收能够在单光子水平且具有100太赫兹的带宽下运行，我们认为所展示的全光开关概念在相干和量子信息网络中具有潜在应用。
