An all-optical switch employing the cascaded second-order nonlinear effect

A new, ultrafast, low loss, all-optical switch based on the cascaded second-order nonlinearity is proposed. The device is based on an integrated Mach-Zehnder interferometer where quasi-phase matching produces a nonlinear phase shift with a different sign in each arm of the interferometer. A full treatment of the nonlinear phase shift indicates that the proposed device, if fabricated in AlGaAs, could switch with powers around 1.3 W in a length of approximately 1 cm.<
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