Although vast amounts of information are conveyed by photons in optical fibers,the majority of data processing is performed electronically,creating the infamous‘information bottleneck’and consuming energy at an incr...Although vast amounts of information are conveyed by photons in optical fibers,the majority of data processing is performed electronically,creating the infamous‘information bottleneck’and consuming energy at an increasingly unsustainable rate.The potential for photonic devices to directly manipulate light remains unfulfilled due largely to a lack of materials with strong,fast optical nonlinearities.In this paper,we show that small-signal amplifier,summator and invertor functions for optical signals may be realized using a four-port device that exploits the coherent interaction of beams on a planar plasmonic metamaterial,assuming no intrinsic nonlinearity.The redistribution of energy among ports can provide nonlinear input-output signal dependencies and may be coherently controlled at very low intensity levels,with multi-THz bandwidth and without introducing signal distortion,thereby presenting powerful opportunities for novel optical data processing architectures,complexity oracles and the locally coherent networks that are becoming part of the mainstream telecommunications agenda.展开更多
According to the fundamental Huygens superposition principle,light beams traveling in a linear medium will pass though one another without mutual disturbance.Indeed,the field of photonics is based on the premise that ...According to the fundamental Huygens superposition principle,light beams traveling in a linear medium will pass though one another without mutual disturbance.Indeed,the field of photonics is based on the premise that controlling light signals with light requires intense laser fields to facilitate beam interactions in nonlinear media,where the superposition principle can be broken.Here we challenge this wisdom and demonstrate that two coherent beams of light of arbitrarily low intensity can interact on a metamaterial layer of nanoscale thickness in such a way that one beam modulates the intensity of the other.We show that the interference of beams can eliminate the plasmonic Joule losses of light energy in the metamaterial or,in contrast,can lead to almost total absorption of light.Applications of this phenomenon may lie in ultrafast all-optical pulse-recovery devices,coherence filters and terahertz-bandwidth light-by-light modulators.展开更多
We introduce a dielectric photonic metamaterial presenting a giant nonlinear optical response driven by resonant optomechanical forces.Being inherently free of Joule losses,it exhibits optical bistability at intensity...We introduce a dielectric photonic metamaterial presenting a giant nonlinear optical response driven by resonant optomechanical forces.Being inherently free of Joule losses,it exhibits optical bistability at intensity levels of less than 0.2 mW mm22 and,furthermore,manifests nonlinear asymmetric transmission with a forward:backward optical extinction ratio of more than 30 dB.展开更多
基金This study was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council(grant EP/G060363/1)the Royal Society,and the Singapore Ministry of Education[Grant MOE2011-T3-1-005]
文摘Although vast amounts of information are conveyed by photons in optical fibers,the majority of data processing is performed electronically,creating the infamous‘information bottleneck’and consuming energy at an increasingly unsustainable rate.The potential for photonic devices to directly manipulate light remains unfulfilled due largely to a lack of materials with strong,fast optical nonlinearities.In this paper,we show that small-signal amplifier,summator and invertor functions for optical signals may be realized using a four-port device that exploits the coherent interaction of beams on a planar plasmonic metamaterial,assuming no intrinsic nonlinearity.The redistribution of energy among ports can provide nonlinear input-output signal dependencies and may be coherently controlled at very low intensity levels,with multi-THz bandwidth and without introducing signal distortion,thereby presenting powerful opportunities for novel optical data processing architectures,complexity oracles and the locally coherent networks that are becoming part of the mainstream telecommunications agenda.
基金The authors thank Jun-Yu Ou and Mengxin Ren for assistance with nanofabrication and optical experiments respectively.This work was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council(grant EP/G060363/1),The Royal Society and the China Scholarship Council.
文摘According to the fundamental Huygens superposition principle,light beams traveling in a linear medium will pass though one another without mutual disturbance.Indeed,the field of photonics is based on the premise that controlling light signals with light requires intense laser fields to facilitate beam interactions in nonlinear media,where the superposition principle can be broken.Here we challenge this wisdom and demonstrate that two coherent beams of light of arbitrarily low intensity can interact on a metamaterial layer of nanoscale thickness in such a way that one beam modulates the intensity of the other.We show that the interference of beams can eliminate the plasmonic Joule losses of light energy in the metamaterial or,in contrast,can lead to almost total absorption of light.Applications of this phenomenon may lie in ultrafast all-optical pulse-recovery devices,coherence filters and terahertz-bandwidth light-by-light modulators.
基金This work was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council(grant EP/G060363/1)[All authors]the Royal Society and the Ministry of Education,Singapore(grant MOE2011-T3-1-005)[NIZ]the China Scholarship Council[JZ].
文摘We introduce a dielectric photonic metamaterial presenting a giant nonlinear optical response driven by resonant optomechanical forces.Being inherently free of Joule losses,it exhibits optical bistability at intensity levels of less than 0.2 mW mm22 and,furthermore,manifests nonlinear asymmetric transmission with a forward:backward optical extinction ratio of more than 30 dB.
