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Plasmonic all-optical tunable wavelength shifter

Nature Photonics volume 1, pages 701–703 (2007)Cite this article

Abstract

At present, wavelength-division-multiplexed fibre lines routinely operate at 10 Gbit s−1 per channel. The transition from static-path networks to true all-optical networks encompassing many nodes, in which channels are added/dropped and efficiently reassigned, will require improved tools for all-optical wavelength shifting. Specifically, one must be able to shift the carrier wavelength (frequency) of an optical data signal over tens of nanometres (a THz range) without the bottleneck of electrical conversion. Popular approaches to this problem make use of the nonlinear interaction between two wavelengths within a semiconductor optical amplifier1 whereas more novel methods invoke terahertz-frequency electro–optic modulation2 and polaritons3. Here we outline the principles and demonstrate the use of optically excited plasmons as a tunable frequency source that can be mixed with a laser frequency through Raman scattering. The scheme is all-optical and enables dynamical control of the output carrier wavelength simply by varying the power of a control laser.

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Figure 1: Schematic diagram showing one period of the MTQW structure.
Figure 2: Downshifted light-scattering spectra from the MTQW for different values of control-beam intensity.
Figure 3: The LO-P peak frequency and the LO peak height as a function of the control-beam intensity.
Figure 4

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Acknowledgements

We thank E. Cohen for supplying us with the MTQW samples used earlier in his studies. This research is supported by the US Department of Energy Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences under contract numbers DE-AC36-83CH10093 and DE-FG02-99ER45780.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Renewable Energy Laboratory, 1617 Cole Blvd, Golden, 80401, Colorado, USA

    B. Fluegel & A. Mascarenhas

  2. Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, 15260, Pennsylvania, USA

    D. W. Snoke

  3. Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies, Murray Hill, 07974, New Jersey, USA

    L. N. Pfeiffer & K. West

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  1. B. Fluegel
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Correspondence to B. Fluegel.

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Fluegel, B., Mascarenhas, A., Snoke, D. et al. Plasmonic all-optical tunable wavelength shifter. Nature Photon 1, 701–703 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2007.229

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