Design and performance of an impedance-detuned high-contrast vertical cavity semiconductor switch

In this paper, the purpose of this work was to design, fabricate and characterize a saturable absorber-based VCS optimized for switching optical signals that have sufficient energies to partly saturate the optical absorption. The optical switching capabilities have been also demonstrated by measuring the oscilloscope traces of the 10-GHz signal after reflection from the optical gate. The device can be used for a wide range of applications including all-optical switching and wavelength conversion.