Abstract
We present theoretical results of a low-loss all-optical switch based on electromagnetically induced transparency and the quantum Zeno effect in a microdisk resonator. We show that a control beam can modify the atomic absorption of the evanescent field which suppresses the cavity field buildup and alters the path of a weak signal beam. We predict more than 35 dB of switching contrast with less than 0.1 dB loss using just 2 μW of control-beam power for signal beams with less than single photon intensities inside the cavity.
Highlights
Over the past few decades transistors and other computing components have dropped in size while simultaneously increasing performance
Induced transparency (EIT) [7, 8] has been investigated as a resource for optical switches [9,10,11,12] and quantum memories [13,14,15,16] due to its large nonlinearity, which is enhanced by coherent effects
We make use of single photon absorption (SPA) to suppress the resonant field buildup in a cavity, and use a control beam to modulate the absorption by inducing Electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT)
Summary
Over the past few decades transistors and other computing components have dropped in size while simultaneously increasing performance. We make use of single photon absorption (SPA) to suppress the resonant field buildup in a cavity, and use a control beam to modulate the absorption by inducing EIT (we refer to the combined EIT and Autler–Townes splitting effect as EIT from here out) The benefit of this approach is that on-resonant SPA has a higher absorption cross-section than known nonlinear processes, potentially enabling better switching results as long as SPA can be sufficiently reduced by EIT. Counter-intuitively, the presence of the strong loss mechanism will not dramatically increase the loss of the system but will instead alter the coupling condition of the cavity which changes the output path of the light This is directly analogous to the suppression of probability amplitudes via measurement in the quantum Zeno effect. Our results indicate that this scheme enables high-contrast, low-loss switching at timescales on the order of the total cavity relaxation time which is roughly ∼ 100 picoseconds for the devices under consideration in this paper
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