Abstract
Photonic crystals, materials with periodic dielectric structures, are able to control the propagation states of photons owing to the so-called photonic-bandgap effect1. Nonlinear photonic crystals, whose refractive-index distribution can be tuned optically, have been used to demonstrate all-optical switching2. However, a high pump intensity is usually required because the nonlinear optical coefficient of conventional materials is relatively small3. Here we report ultrafast and low-power photonic-crystal all-optical switching based on strong optical nonlinearity enhancement due to excited-state interelectron transfer. Compared with the case without nonlinearity enhancement, the switching operation power is reduced by four orders of magnitude while the ultrafast response time, of the order of a picosecond, is maintained. This provides a strategy for constructing photonic materials with large nonlinearity and studying ultrafast low-power integrated photonic devices.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grants 10574007, 10521002 and 10434020, and the National Basic Research Program of China under grant 2007CB307001.
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X.H., P.J., H.Y. and C.D. carried out the experiments. X.H. made the main contribution to the experiments and data analysis. Q.G. conceived the experiments, wrote the manuscript and helped with the data analysis.
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Hu, X., Jiang, P., Ding, C. et al. Picosecond and low-power all-optical switching based on an organic photonic-bandgap microcavity. Nature Photon 2, 185–189 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2007.299
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2007.299
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