PT-symmetry in optics

Zyablovsky, A. A.; Vinogradov, A. P.; Pukhov, A. A.; Dorofeenko, A. V.; Lisyansky, A. A.

doi:10.3367/ufne.0184.201411b.1177

Cited by 246 publications

(175 citation statements)

References 63 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

174

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…In principle, the control power can be further engineered to be much weaker than the signal power by reducing the modulation depth δ of Im½Δε responsible for the asymmetric reflection. Although the proposed metawaveguide does not break Lorentz reciprocity, further consideration with nonlinearity [34] may promise novel optical isolators [35] and highly integrated all-optical transistors gates [36]. Integration of Kerr nonlinearity may also enable an approach to flexibly manipulate the metawaveguide towards or away from the exceptional point [37], proving an additional freedom in the interferometric light-light switching.…”

Section: Að0þmentioning

confidence: 99%

Metawaveguide for Asymmetric Interferometric Light-Light Switching

Zhao

Fegadolli

et al. 2016

Phys. Rev. Lett.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Light-light switching typically requires strong nonlinearity where intense laser fields route and direct data flows of weak power, leading to a high power consumption that limits its practical use. Here we report an experimental demonstration of a metawaveguide that operates exactly in the opposite way in a linear regime, where an intense laser field is interferometrically manipulated on demand by a weak control beam with a modulation extinction ratio up to approximately 60 dB. This asymmetric control results from operating near an exceptional point of the scattering matrix, which gives rise to intrinsic asymmetric reflections of the metawaveguide through delicate interplay between index and absorption. The designed metawaveguide promises low-power interferometric light-light switching for the next generation of optical devices and networks. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.117.193901 Effective light-light switching promises optical information processing, which has been a long-standing driving force for high-speed and energy-efficient optical networks. Strong optical modulations are initiated in nonlinear optical media by intense laser fields to enable switching of a weak signal, for example, intensity modulation of light by light has been demonstrated based on the all-optical Kerr effect [1][2][3][4][5][6]. Nevertheless, the high power requirement for the intense control or pump light becomes a significant barrier for practical applications. While cavity quantum electrodynamics displays nonlinear optical effects on a few-photon level [7,8], its application as a robust optical element operating in the classical regime remains still unclear. On the other hand, a recent pioneering investigation of exploiting photonics absorption offered a unique linear scheme to efficiently control light by light utilizing mutually coherent interaction of light beams and absorbing matters [9,10], by which coherent perfect absorption (CPA) was demonstrated [11][12][13][14]. While this linear strategy reduces the power requirement, the control beam still has a similar amount of power as the actual source signal in these previous works, due to the rather symmetric optical scatterings in the optical implementations.The recent emergence of non-Hermitian photonic metamaterials offers a new paradigm to explore nanophotonics and metamaterials research in the entire complex dielectric permittivity plane, based on parity-time (PT) symmetry [15][16][17][18][19][20]. Attractive physical phenomena including phase transitions and exceptional points are emulated with photonics, consequently, leading to novel effective manipulation of cavity lasing modes [21][22][23][24][25][26] and unidirectional light transport [27][28][29][30][31][32]. Here, we will show a unique metawaveguide of potential for on-demand control of interferometric light-light switching can be realized through non-Hermitian metamaterial explorations.An intriguing characteristic of non-Hermitian photonic metamaterials is their intrinsic asymmetry near an exceptional point. For PT sym...

show abstract

Section: Að0þmentioning

confidence: 99%

Metawaveguide for Asymmetric Interferometric Light-Light Switching

Zhao

Fegadolli

et al. 2016

Phys. Rev. Lett.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…A PT -symmetric system has unimodular eigenvalues |s 1 | = |s 2 | = 1 of the scattering matrix. When PT symmetry is violated, the modules of the eigenvalues are inverse as |s 1 definition of the scattering matrix [10] …”

Section: Phase Transition Dynamicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…PT -symmetric structures and PT symmetry breaking seem to be one of the most intensively studied fields in optics and photonics of active systems [1][2][3]. It dates back to the seminal works of Bender and Boettcher [4,5], who discovered the real-valued spectra of non-Hermitian Hamiltonians in quantum mechanics, provided these Hamiltonians are parity-time (PT ) symmetric, i.e., invariant with respect to simultaneous parity change and time reversal.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

PT symmetry breaking in multilayers with resonant loss and gain locks light propagation direction

et al. 2018

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Using the Maxwell-Bloch equations for resonantly absorbing and amplifying media, we study the temporal dynamics of light propagation through the PT -symmetric structures with alternating loss and gain layers. This approach allows us to precisely describe the response of the structure near the exceptional points of PT -symmetry breaking phase transition and, in particular, take into account the nonlinear effect of loss and gain saturation in the PT -symmetry broken state. We reveal that in this latter state the multilayer system possesses a lasing-like behavior releasing the pumped energy in the form of powerful pulses. We predict locking of pulse direction due to the PT -symmetry breaking, as well as saturation-induced irreversibility of phase transition and nonreciprocal transmission.

show abstract

“…[10]. The special spectral features play an important role for dielectric microcavities, see a review paper [11], and can in particular facilitate singlemode lasing [12,13] and find various other applications (see the recent review paper [14] and references therein).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nonlinear switching and solitons in PT‐symmetric photonic systems

Suchkov

Sukhorukov

Huang

et al. 2016

Laser & Photonics Reviews

345

263

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

One of the challenges of the modern photonics is to develop all-optical devices enabling increased speed and energy efficiency for transmitting and processing information on an optical chip. It is believed that the recently suggested ParityTime (PT) symmetric photonic systems with alternating regions of gain and loss can bring novel functionalities. In such systems, losses are as important as gain and, depending on the structural parameters, gain compensates losses. Generally, PT systems demonstrate nontrivial non-conservative wave interactions and phase transitions, which can be employed for signal filtering and switching, opening new prospects for active control of light. In this review, we discuss a broad range of problems involving nonlinear PT-symmetric photonic systems with an intensitydependent refractive index. Nonlinearity in such PT symmetric systems provides a basis for many effects such as the formation of localized modes, nonlinearly-induced PT-symmetry breaking, and all-optical switching. Nonlinear PT-symmetric systems can serve as powerful building blocks for the development of novel photonic devices targeting an active light control.

show abstract

PT-symmetry in optics

Cited by 246 publications

References 63 publications

Metawaveguide for Asymmetric Interferometric Light-Light Switching

Metawaveguide for Asymmetric Interferometric Light-Light Switching

PT symmetry breaking in multilayers with resonant loss and gain locks light propagation direction

Nonlinear switching and solitons in PT‐symmetric photonic systems

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About