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Silicon photonics

A chip-scale one-way valve for light

Nature Photonics volume 3, pages 77–79 (2009)Cite this article

For integrated photonics to take off, light signals zooming around optical chips must be successfully isolated from one another. Scientists at Stanford University have now designed a miniature one-way valve for light that uses photonic transitions and is potentially compatible with silicon-chip CMOS fabrication processes.

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Figure 1: Illustration of how a travelling (dynamic) modulation of a silicon waveguide's refractive index can be used to perform optical isolation.
Figure 2: Field distribution and frequency response of the modulated coupled ring–waveguide structure.

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  1. S. J. Ben Yoo is in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, Davis, California 95916, USA. yoo@ece.ucdavis.edu,

    S. J. Ben Yoo

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  1. S. J. Ben Yoo
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Yoo, S. A chip-scale one-way valve for light. Nature Photon 3, 77–79 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2008.279

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