Ultrafast optical switching and data encoding on synthesized light fields

Abstract

Modern electronics are founded on switching the electrical signal by radio frequency electromagnetic fields on the nanosecond time scale, limiting the information processing to the gigahertz speed. Recently, optical switches have been demonstrated using terahertz and ultrafast laser pulses to control the electrical signal and enhance the switching speed to the picosecond and a few hundred femtoseconds time scale. Here, we exploit the reflectivity modulation of the fused silica dielectric system in a strong light field to demonstrate the optical switching (ON/OFF) with attosecond time resolution. Moreover, we present the capability of controlling the optical switching signal with complex synthesized fields of ultrashort laser pulses for data binary encoding. This work paves the way for establishing optical switches and light-based electronics with petahertz speeds, several orders of magnitude faster than the current semiconductor-based electronics, opening a new realm in information technology, optical communications, and photonic processor technologies.

Lightwave Electronics: Attosecond Optical Switching

“…42 This new approach is based on the linear optical response and accordingly alters the optical reflectivity of dielectric material (i.e., silicon dioxide). 42 The reflected signal of a probe signal modulates following the field of the pump laser pulse linearly, providing a controlling time window in the subhalf-cycle field time (<1 fs) scale. Remarkably, this overcomes the nonlinear limitation in typical reported optical switches mentioned previously.…”

“…Furthermore, ultrafast optical switching speed has a significant leap to achieve the attosecond time scale by utilizing an attosecond synthesized subcycle light field (Figure 1) 41 for controlling the induced electron current in dielectric materials. 42 This new approach is based on the linear optical response and accordingly alters the optical reflectivity of dielectric material (i.e., silicon dioxide). 42 The reflected signal of a probe signal modulates following the field of the pump laser pulse linearly, providing a controlling time window in the subhalf-cycle field time (<1 fs) scale.…”

“…This synthesized attosecond optical pulses approach has been used to demonstrate all-optical switching of light signal (ON/OFF) with attosecond resolution (illustration is shown in Figure 1), orders of magnitude faster than previously demonstrated all-optical switching. 42 Moreover, this switching approach would be adopted to control the light-induced current directly in a dielectric or graphene transistor, which would be a leap forward to integrating this field-induced switching on a photonics chip. This attosecond optical switching paves the way to develop petahertz optical transistors, a million times faster than the current semiconductor-based electronics, which is highly desired to fill the current gap of the computing power and limited speed of electronic chips.…”

“…Furthermore, ultrafast optical switching speed has a significant leap to achieve the attosecond time scale by utilizing an attosecond synthesized subcycle light field (Figure ) for controlling the induced electron current in dielectric materials . This new approach is based on the linear optical response and accordingly alters the optical reflectivity of dielectric material (i.e., silicon dioxide) .…”

Enhancing the Ultrafast Third-Order Nonlinear Optical Response by Charge Transfer in VSe2-Reduced Graphene Oxide Hybrid

“…Third-order nonlinear optical effects play a crucial role in understanding the light–matter interaction and are characterized by the susceptibility (χ) = n 2 + iβ in which the real part ( n 2 ) represents the nonlinear refractive index and the imaginary part (β) indicates the two-photon/excited-state absorption. − These third-order nonlinear optical phenomena encompass significant effects such as third harmonic generation, intensity-dependent refractive index, optical Stark effect, and self-focusing or defocusing. , These phenomena hold great promise in various applications, including quantum information processing, where they can serve as ultrafast optical switches, facilitating the generation of entangled photon pairs, optical modulators and limiters, , saturable absorbers, and two-photon imaging and microscopy . As a result, third-order optical nonlinearity has been extensively investigated in various materials, ranging from metals, semimetals, semiconductors from low dimension (0–2) to bulk, − organic materials, and topological materials .…”