Spatial Soliton Interactions for Photonic Switching. Part I
Abstract
High-bandwidth optical communications will greatly benefit from optical switches since they could eliminate the optical/electronic conversion. Optical logic gates allowing data regeneration, gain, cascadability, would allow even more complex all-optical routing functions. In this work we report on an in-depth study of an optical logic gates based on spatial and spatio-temporal solitons. Optical solitons that propagate long distances without change, act as the natural carrier of binary data due to their stability to perturbations and intrinsic threshold. The non-diffracting nature of spatial optical solitons lends to their use in a class of angular deflection logic gates in which a weak signal can alter the propagation of a strong pump in order to change the device state from high to low, thereby implementing a controlled inverter which is cascadable to produce logically-complete, multi-input NOR. This work develops theoretical and numerical framework to describe general, multi-dimensional, spatio-temporal wave phenomenal from Maxwell's equations we derive via the multiple-scales perturbation technique a first order, fully-vectorial, nonlinear wave equation, that is valid beyond the standard slowly-varying amplitude, slowly-varying envelope, and paraxial approximations. In addition to coupling with the orthogonal transverse field, vector coupling with the weak longitudinally-projected field is also treated, along with the cascaded interaction with a weak third-harmonic wave which can produce a desirable saturation effect.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Mar 07, 2000
- Accession Number
- ADA376577
Entities
People
- Kelvin Wagner
- Steve Blair
Organizations
- University of Colorado Boulder