Fibre-optic metadevice for all-optical signal modulation based on coherent absorption

• Main Authors: Xomalis, Angelos, Demirtzioglou, Iosif, Plum, Eric, Jung, Yongmin, Nalla, Venkatram, Lacava, Cosimo, MacDonald, Kevin F, Petropoulos, Periklis, Richardson, David J, Zheludev, Nikolay I
• Other Authors: School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2018
• Subjects: Fibre Optics And Optical Communications
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/87207; http://hdl.handle.net/10220/44348
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

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.