All-optical applications for passive photonic devices of TaS2 nanosheets with strong Kerr nonlinearity

Abstract

2D Tantalum disulphide (TaS2) has been widely studied as a typical transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) with excellent optical, chemical and electrochemical properties. However, there is little research on the comprehensively characterizing the interaction between light and the 2D TaS2 material. In this work, we studied the nonlinear optical response of the high quality few-layer TaS2 nanosheets and its all-optical applications. Our research shows that 2D TaS2 nanosheet has a broadband characteristic and exhibits a strong Kerr nonlinear optical response based on the spatial self-phase modulation (SSPM). More importantly, by taking advantage of the highly nonlinear optical response of the2D TaS2, typical all-optical phenomena, such as all-optical switching and nonreciprocal light propagation, have been demonstrated experimentally. This work can be viewed as an important demonstration of a TMDCs-based application prototype in nonlinear photonics, which could potentially indicate an essential step toward miscellaneous TMDCs-based passive photonic devices (all-optical diodes, all-optical switches, etc.)