Article
Non-Hermitian engineering of synthetic saturable absorbers for applications in photonics
Physical Review Applied
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1-20-2017
Disciplines
Abstract
We explore a type of synthetic saturable absorber based on quantum-inspired photonic arrays. We demonstrate that the interplay between optical Kerr nonlinearity, interference effects, and non-Hermiticity through radiation loss leads to a nonlinear optical filtering response with two distinct regimes of small and large optical transmissions. More interestingly, we show that the boundary between these two regimes can be very sharp. The threshold optical intensity that marks this abrupt “phase transition” and its steepness can be engineered by varying the number of the guiding elements. The practical feasibility of these structures as well as their potential applications in laser systems and optical signal processing are also discussed.
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Publisher's PDF
Citation Information
M. H. Teimourpour, A. Rahman, K. Srinivasan and Ramy El-Ganainy. "Non-Hermitian engineering of synthetic saturable absorbers for applications in photonics" Physical Review Applied Vol. 7 (2017) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/ramy_el-ganainy/23/
© 2017 American Physical Society. Article deposited here in compliance with publisher policies. Publisher's version of record: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevApplied.7.014015