Ultrafast All-Optical Switching in a Silicon-Nanocrystal-Based Silicon Slot Waveguide at Telecom Wavelengths

Abstract

We demonstrate experimentally all-optical switching on a silicon chip at telecom wavelengths. The switching device comprises a compact ring resonator formed by horizontal silicon slot waveguides filled with highly nonlinear silicon nanocrystals in silica. When pumping at power levels about 100 mW using 10 ps pulses, more than 50% modulation depth is observed at the switch output. The switch performs about 1 order of magnitude faster than previous approaches on silicon and is fully fabricated using complementary metal oxide semiconductor technologies.

Nanoscale Surface Plasmon All-Optical Diode Based on Plasmonic Slot Waveguides

“…Our calculations mean that the all-optical diode can be achieved even if the plasmonic slot waveguide possesses a certain range of disorder degrees in the depth or width of the plasmonic grating grooves. High-quality silver and silicon films can be fabricated very conveniently by a variety of thin-film growth techniques, such as the molecular-beam epitaxy method, the chemical vapor deposition method, and the magnetron sputtering method [29,30]. The asymmetric plasmonic grating can be fabricated by use of the microfabrication techniques, such as the focused ion-beam etching method, the electron-beam lithography method, and so on [31].…”

Nanosilicon: a new platform for photonics

“…The slow time response of the baseline is due to other NL process. Time response in the order of 10 ps were achieved and improved performances are expected in more carefully optimized structures [9]: …”

Nonlinear Silicon Photonic Signal Processing Devices for Future Optical Networks

“…Thanks to their high refractive index difference (>2) and the strong third-order nonlinear response of silicon [4,5], SOI waveguides have been widely used to observe nonlinear optical effects. SOI devices have substantially contributed to the realization of efficient all optical nonlinear components; a number of fundamental functionalities have been demonstrated in the SOI nonlinear platform such as all optical wavelength conversion [6][7][8][9], optical switching [10,11], format conversion [12,13], logic operation [14] and high speed all optical modulation [10,15,16].…”