Abstract
For decades, Information technology has been dominated by electronics. Increasingly, however, the physical limitations of electronics are being or have been reached and scientists are exploring new technologies for transmitting, storing and processing information. Many believe that light or photons will form the new “current” for information in the next century and that photonics could possibly supplant electronics in several devices. Certainly photonics is now making significant inroads in areas such as transmission and storage. However, the same can’t be said of routing and switching, since such functions are still carried out using all electronic or hybrid, opto-electronic technologies. Increasing demands for integration call for all-optical switching devices and it has become the “holy grail” of the emerging optical communication technologies to find suitable materials which display a large enough and fast enough optical response to be considered for such devices. The underlying physical mechanism which is being researched in many of these quests is photo-induced refractive index changes [Shen, 1984; Gibbs,1985]. It is envisioned that a gate optical pulse can be used to alter the local refractive index in a device and thus modify the direction of propagation, phase, or transmission of an optical pulse passing through the device in what is commonly referred to as light-by-light switching. Many different types of materials have been and continue to be investigated for these applications including semiconductors, glasses, semiconductor-doped glasses, and polymers [Miller, 1981; Stegeman, 1985; Haug, 1988; Gibbs, 1990]. Also, several different geometries have been researched for switching applications based on Fabry-Perot interferometers, etalons, waveguides, diffraction, and scattering [Stegeman, 1985].
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Fox, E.C., van Driel, H.M. (1993). Femtosecond Probing of Photoinduced Refractive Index Changes in Semiconductors. In: Bron, W.E. (eds) Ultrashort Processes in Condensed Matter. NATO ASI Series, vol 314. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-2954-5_1
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