Optical switching in hybrid semiconductor nonlinear photonic crystal slabs with Kerr materials

Abstract

Nonlinear photonic crystals, whose refractive index distribution can be tuned optically, have been used to demonstrate all-optical switching due to a change of the refractive index and subsequent shift of the bandgap edge or the defect state resonant frequency. Semiconductor-based all-optical switching is still limited by the weak nonlinearity and the slow response time owing to the slow dynamics of two-photon-generated free carriers. Here we introduce a concept of hybrid nonlinear photonic crystals that are made from infiltrating the air-hole array or coating the surface of the usual semiconductor photonic crystal slabs with organic polystyrene materials. The hybrid configuration can help to realize very fast response speeds and strong nonlinearity in the semiconductor-based device. We study the influence of the thickness of the polystyrene film on the gap shift scale, and also analyze its physical mechanism. The switching effect on this structure was discussed, and shows that the nonlinear hybrid structure can achieve relatively larger transmission contrast. Our result may be helpful in designing integrated optical circuits.

Dipole-dipole interaction between a quantum dot and a graphene nanodisk

“…This change is quantified by the expression n ′ a = n a + n 3 I pump where n 3 is the Kerr nonlinearity constant and has the value n 3 = 1.15 × 10 −12 cm 2 /W for polystyrene. 10 For the pump field intensity I pump = 31.0 GW/cm 2 we found that the photonic crystal band edge shifts such that ∆ε v = − 17.32 meV. This means that the hybrid system can be used to study the nonlinear properties of photonic crystals.…”

“…Applications for photonic crystals include all-optical microchips for optical information processing, optical communication networks, sensors, and solar energy harvesting. [7][8][9][10][11][12] In our investigation, we consider a nonlinear photonic crystal, which has a refractive index distribution that can be tuned optically. The nonlinear photonic crystal surrounds the hybrid system and is used to manipulate the interaction between the quantum emitter and graphene nanodisk.…”

Polystyrene Kerr nonlinear photonic crystals for building ultrafast optical switching and logic devices

“…It takes advantage of the high-index contrast of silicon and superior optical nonlinearity of polystyrene, and ease of integration with other silicon optical devices. 68 The key point in fabricating this semiconductor-polymer compound NPC lies in how to uniformly and densely ll polymers into the small air holes with a diameter of only hundreds of nanometers. Previously, several techniques have been employed for the inltration of PCs with organic composites.…”

Design of all-optical switching component based on pillar-array hybrid nonlinear photonic crystal cavity

“…Another type of hybrid structure, namely slab PC with air holes infiltrated with polymer materials, has been proposed and analyzed theoretically in our previous works [26,27], and the bandgap and cavity mode shift under external pump light have been investigated. The resulting photonic crystal is a hybrid slab structure, which can be made by infiltrating organic polymer materials into the void space of the pillar array.…”