Nature Communications (Sep 2023)

Engineering the temporal dynamics of all-optical switching with fast and slow materials

  • Soham Saha,
  • Benjamin T. Diroll,
  • Mustafa Goksu Ozlu,
  • Sarah N. Chowdhury,
  • Samuel Peana,
  • Zhaxylyk Kudyshev,
  • Richard D. Schaller,
  • Zubin Jacob,
  • Vladimir M. Shalaev,
  • Alexander V. Kildishev,
  • Alexandra Boltasseva

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-41377-5
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 14, no. 1
pp. 1 – 9

Abstract

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Abstract All-optical switches control the amplitude, phase, and polarization of light using optical control pulses. They can operate at ultrafast timescales – essential for technology-driven applications like optical computing, and fundamental studies like time-reflection. Conventional all-optical switches have a fixed switching time, but this work demonstrates that the response-time can be controlled by selectively controlling the light-matter-interaction in so-called fast and slow materials. The bi-material switch has a nanosecond response when the probe interacts strongly with titanium nitride near its epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) wavelength. The response-time speeds up over two orders of magnitude with increasing probe-wavelength, as light’s interaction with the faster Aluminum-doped zinc oxide (AZO) increases, eventually reaching the picosecond-scale near AZO’s ENZ-regime. This scheme provides several additional degrees of freedom for switching time control, such as probe-polarization and incident angle, and the pump-wavelength. This approach could lead to new functionalities within key applications in multiband transmission, optical computing, and nonlinear optics.