All-optical signal processing in few-layer bismuthene coated microfiber: towards applications in optical fiber systems.

Abstract

Two-dimensional (2D) bismuthene can find its wide potential applications due to its appealing optical and electronic properties. Especially, bismuthene exhibits layer-count dependent direct bandgaps and strong light-matter interaction, enabling its applications in all-optical signal processing area that can overcome the bottle-neck in existing electrical signal processing. However, light-bismuthene interaction based on main stream optical fiber systems and its application in all-optical signal processing is relatively less investigated. In this work, few-layer bismuthene, synthesized with facile solution processing method, is coated onto a piece of microfiber. The experimental results show that this device can operate as an optical Kerr switcher and a four-wave-mixing-based wavelength converter under different configuration. The results including wavelength applicability, information bandwidth, eye diagrams in combination with bit-error rate (BER) performance and stability measurements confirm its feasibility in optical fiber systems. To the best of our knowledge, it is first prototypic device reported in this work for bismuthene in all-optical signal processing optical fiber systems.