Experimental demonstration of a transient grating controlled all-optical switch

Abstract

We demonstrate an on-fiber all-optical switching device based on a transient grating formed by the interference of control laser pulses in a Kerr-type nonlinear material placed in the evanescent region of the fiber. The device can operate in two distinctive modes. First, switching/coupling among the fiber modes using bulk index modulation was investigated and an efficiency of about %0.55 @852 nm was measured. Second, by exploiting Four Wave Mixing (FWM), an all-optical switching that transfers power among light signals with wavelengths of λ 1 = 440 nm and λ 2 = 663 nm was achieved by quasi-phase-matching and fRequency matching in a nonlinear thin polymeric film. The results prove that the introduced switching structure may have the potential to be used in integrated photonic applications such as intensity modulators or controllable couplers.