All-optical tunable slow-light based on an analogue of electromagnetically induced transparency in a hybrid metamaterial.

We demonstrate and analyze the use of metamaterials featuring an analogue of electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) in slow light technology. For most metamaterials, EIT-like effects suffer from intrinsic ohmic loss, and the metamaterial-based slow-light effect can only be tuned passively, which limits their application in slow light devices. We propose a hybrid metamaterial with a unit cell composed of a ring resonator formed from photoactive silicon (Si) and a rectangular bar formed from metallic silver (Ag). Based on an analogue of EIT in the designed hybrid metamaterial, we theoretically demonstrate an all-optical tunable slow-light effect in the telecommunication window. We successfully demonstrate the possibility of designing novel all-optical tunable chip-scale slow-light devices that could be used in optical buffering.