All-optical transmission modulation due to inelastic interactions of ultrashort pulses in a disordered resonant medium

Abstract

Random resonant media being one of the possible realizations of disordered metamaterials open a room of opportunities for achieving new fundamental effects and designing advanced nanophotonic devices. Strongly nonlinear optical properties of such media attract ever increasing attention nowadays from both theoretical and experimental points of view. Hereinafter we consider the case of the photonic-crystal-like structure with a randomly varying light-matter coupling provided by the random density of quantum particles. Using numerical solution of the Maxwell-Bloch equations, we study the effects of the pulse collisions in the medium. It is shown that disorder enables the qualitative changes of the system's response for copropagating pulses, whereas this is not the case for the counterpropagating ones. We propose the scheme for an all-optical transmission modulation due to the disorder-induced inelasticity of collisions of co-propagating pulses. The ability of the precise tuning the modulation via the inter-pulse distance and background refractive index adjustment is revealed. This novel approach for light control could be utilized for some highly demanded applications, such as modulation and switching of a pulsed radiation.

arXiv comment9 pages, 8 figures

References in corpus (18)

• Complex wavefront engineering with disorder-engineered metasurfaces
• Absence of Anderson localization of light in a random ensemble of point scatterers
• Purcell effect in Hyperbolic Metamaterial Resonators
• All-optical control of unipolar pulse generation in a resonant medium with nonlinear field coupling
• Scattering Suppression from Arbitrary Objects in Spatially-Dispersive Layered Metamaterials
• Strong Purcell effect in anisotropic $\epsilon$-near-zero metamaterials
• Bistability of Anderson localized states in nonlinear random media
• Anderson localization in metamaterials and other complex media
• Comparison of Quantum and Classical Local-field Effects on Two-Level Atoms in a Dielectric
• Localization transition for light scattering by cold atoms in an external magnetic field
• Femtosecond pulses in a dense two-level medium: Spectral transformations, transient processes, and collisional dynamics
• Compression of an intensive light pulse in a dense resonant medium and photonic-band-gap structures containing it
• Anderson localization in disordered LN photonic crystal slab cavities
• Two mechanisms of disorder-induced localization in photonic-crystal waveguides
• Controlled absorption and all-optical diode action due to collisions of self-induced transparency solitons
• Pulse driven switching in one-dimensional nonlinear photonic band gap materials: a numerical study
• Local field effect as a function of pulse duration
• Disordered resonant media: Self-induced transparency versus light localization

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Different regimes of ultrashort pulse propagation in disordered layered media with resonant loss and gain