Engineering the temporal dynamics of all-optical switching with fast and slow materials

Autor: Soham Saha, Benjamin T. Diroll, Mustafa Goksu Ozlu, Sarah N. Chowdhury, Samuel Peana, Zhaxylyk Kudyshev, Richard D. Schaller, Zubin Jacob, Vladimir M. Shalaev, Alexander V. Kildishev, Alexandra Boltasseva
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2023
Předmět:
Zdroj: Nature Communications, Vol 14, Iss 1, Pp 1-9 (2023)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 2041-1723
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-41377-5
Popis: Abstract All-optical switches control the amplitude, phase, and polarization of light using optical control pulses. They can operate at ultrafast timescales – essential for technology-driven applications like optical computing, and fundamental studies like time-reflection. Conventional all-optical switches have a fixed switching time, but this work demonstrates that the response-time can be controlled by selectively controlling the light-matter-interaction in so-called fast and slow materials. The bi-material switch has a nanosecond response when the probe interacts strongly with titanium nitride near its epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) wavelength. The response-time speeds up over two orders of magnitude with increasing probe-wavelength, as light’s interaction with the faster Aluminum-doped zinc oxide (AZO) increases, eventually reaching the picosecond-scale near AZO’s ENZ-regime. This scheme provides several additional degrees of freedom for switching time control, such as probe-polarization and incident angle, and the pump-wavelength. This approach could lead to new functionalities within key applications in multiband transmission, optical computing, and nonlinear optics.
Databáze: Directory of Open Access Journals