A team led by Alireza Marandi, assistant professor of electrical engineering and applied physics at Caltech, has developed an all-optical switch in lithium niobate with the potential to perform optical signal processing.
The research, which was published in the journal Nature Photonics on July 28, studies how pulses of light can be temporarily confined in a tiny space in the substrate.
The net result is the creation of a nonlinear splitter in which the light pulses are routed to two different outputs based on their energies, which enables switching to occur in less than 50 femtoseconds (a femtosecond is a quadrillionth of a second).
