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

Author
Abstract
:

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.

Year of Publication
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2018
Journal
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Nature communications
Volume
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9
Issue
:
1
Number of Pages
:
182
Date Published
:
2018
URL
:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-017-02434-y
DOI
:
10.1038/s41467-017-02434-y
Short Title
:
Nat Commun
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