All-optical switching via four-wave mixing Bragg scattering in a silicon platform

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates all-optical switching in a silicon platform using four-wave mixing Bragg scattering, enabling low-power optical logic operations with promising experimental results.

Contribution

The work introduces a novel low-power all-optical switching method in silicon using FWM-BS, advancing towards universal optical logic gates.

Findings

Successful wavelength conversion controlled by a weak pump

Operation maintained at very low power levels

Eye-diagrams indicate effective logic gate performance

Abstract

We employ the process of non-degenerate four-wave mixing Bragg scattering (FWM-BS) to demonstrate all-optical control in a silicon platform. In our configuration, a strong, non-information-carrying pump is mixed with a weak control pump and an input signal in a silicon-on-insulator waveguide. Through the optical nonlinearity of this highly-confining waveguide, the weak pump controls the wavelength conversion process from the signal to an idler, leading to a controlled depletion of the signal. The strong pump, on the other hand, plays the role of a constant bias. In this work, we show experimentally that it is possible to implement this low-power switching technique as a first step towards universal optical logic gates, and test the performance with random binary data. Even at very low powers, where the signal and control pump levels are almost equal, the eye-diagrams remain open, indicating a successful operation of the logic gates.