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Optical bistable switch based on the nonlinear Kerr effect of chalcogenide

glass in a rectangular defect of a photonic crystal

Article  in  Journal of Computational Electronics · December 2019

DOI: 10.1007/s10825-019-01402-7

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Journal of Computational Electronics
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10825-019-01402-7

Optical bistable switch based on the nonlinear Kerr effect

of chalcogenide glass in a rectangular defect of a photonic crystal
Seyyed Moin Alden Mostaan1 · Hassan Rasooli Saghai2

© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019

Abstract
An optical bistable switch based on a photonic crystal resonator using the nonlinear effect of a chalcogenide glass in a rectan-
gular defect cavity is proposed and investigated numerically. The influences of the designed cavity and refractive index of the
Kerr nonlinear medium on the transmission of the resonator are analyzed precisely through finite-difference time-domain
simulation. The simulation results show that our compact structure possesses excellent switching characteristics by tuning
the incident electric intensity. The properties of the optical bistability are investigated at the resonance wavelength with
three different detuning parameters. In addition, the results show that this switch has a wide operating wavelength regime
and fast operation speed of 90 Gb/s. Considering numerous characteristics, such a high-speed switch can find application
for all-optical devices.

Keywords  Bistability · Switching · Kerr nonlinear · Photonic crystal cavity

1 Introduction based on PhCs have been proposed, for instance, all-optical

Efficient photonic all-optical switches that can be integrated
with various practical devices become a crucial component
in optical circuit of future technology of communication and
signal processing. The most practical and basic integrated
photonic circuit performance based on all-optical control of
light is bistable switching. As a comparison to its counter-
parts of electronic transistors and diodes, all-optical bista-
ble switches can possess the functionality of fast ON/OFF
conversion [1–3]. Photonic crystals (PhCs) were found to be
capable of creating strong optical nonlinear effects as well
as minimizing all-optical components, all of which attribute
to its significant enhancement of optical field and the ability
of light manipulation in nanometer and micrometer domain
[4]. Quite recently, several kinds of nonlinear optical devices
* Hassan Rasooli Saghai
h_rasooli@iaut.ac.ir
Seyyed Moin Alden Mostaan
moin.mostaan@gmail.com
1
Department of Electrical Engineering, East Azarbaijan
Science and Research Branch, Tabriz Branch, Islamic Azad
University, Tabriz, Iran
2
Department of Electrical Engineering, Tabriz Branch,
Islamic Azad University, Tabriz, Iran
memory [5, 6], transistor action [7], switches [8–10], etc.
According to a large number of studies, optical bistability
can be seen in a variety of PhCs structure. PhCs cavity not
only decreases the dimension of optical resonator, but also
achieves large local field enhancement created inside. Such
strong field enhancement at a small volume can be exploited
to manipulate light-mater interaction and improve the per-
formance of PhCs devices based on optical nonlinear effect.
Owning to these mentioned characteristics, PhC nonlinear
bistable switches demonstrated considerable decreases in
switching energy by employing small cavity for large Q/V
ratio, wherein Q and V are the cavity quality factor and mode
volume, respectively [11, 12].
Considering these issue, we proposed and numerically
investigated optical bistable switch with low operating
intensity and fast response time in a PhC rectangular defect
coupled with two PhC waveguides. The rectangular defect
is filled with nonlinear Kerr material. The dielectric con-
stant of Kerr nonlinear medium in the cavity will change
while varying the incident intensity and the transmission
of light can be controlled. Finite-difference time-domain
(FDTD) simulation results show the triangular line shape of
the resonance profile and hysteresis loop of the system. Our
proposed compact switch can have potential applications in

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all-optical information processing devices like optical flip
flop, optical memory, etc.
2 Design and modeling
The structure of the switch with a rectangular defect and
two waveguides in PhC with a triangle lattice of air holes
in dielectric background are shown in Fig. 1. The triangu-
lar PhCs are practically important since they have a large
transverse electric band gap and it is expected to serve a
good platform for photonic integrated circuit and compact
photonic switch [13].
The W1 waveguides are created by removing a row of air
holes and are used to couple light in an out of the designed
cavity. The cavity is obtained by varying the shape of two
holes and creating a rectangle. The background dielec-
tric constant of 2D PhC is ε = 12.04, the lattice constant
is a = 400 nm, the holes radius is r = 0.3a, the radius of
black holes is rb = 0.22a, the total length of the device is
L = 8.1 μm, the length and width of the rectangular defect
are 1.7a and 0.7a, respectively, and the rectangular defect
is filled with Kerr nonlinear material whose dielectric con-
stant ε depends on the intensity of electric field |E|2 [14]:
ε = ε0 + χ(3) |E|2. The intensity is determined by |E|2, which
represents the square amplitude of incident light. The Kerr
nonlinear material is assumed to be chalcogenide glass
­(As2S3) with the linear dielectric constant ε0 = 5.66, and
third-order nonlinear susceptibility of χ(3) = 1.34 × 10−10
esu [15, 16], at wavelength of 1.55 μm. The mechanisms
such as two photon absorption and induced free carrier effect
in PhC material are not considered in our numerical inves-
tigation. TE-polarized light is injected to the input of the
PhC waveguide, and then this incident light couples to the
designed cavity. The standing wave modes in the cavity will
be excited if the resonant condition is satisfied [17]. It is
well known that the resonant mode is sensitive to dielectric
constant of the cavity [14], which can be altered by inci-
dent pump light due to the optical Kerr effect of nonlinear
Fig. 1  Structural schematic of a rectangular defect filled with chalco-
genide glass. The defect coupled to input and output PhC W1 wave-
guides
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Journal of Computational Electronics
material. Thanks to high-quality factor of PhC defects,
the resonance field intensity in the cavity will we be sig-
nificantly enhanced and causes strong nonlinear effect. The
transmitted spectrum near the resonance condition can be
described by the temporal coupled mode theory [17, 18].
In linear regime, the transmission is defined as T = [1/4Q2]/
[(ω − ω0/ω0)2 + 1/4Q2], where ω is the frequency of incident
light and ω0 is the resonance frequency. According to this
theory in Kerr nonlinear regime, we find the transmission
deforms to T = 1/[1 − (Pout/P0 − δ)2], where Pout is steady
output power, δ is the detuning of incident frequency to the
resonance frequency (δ = (ω0 − ω)/γ), where γ is the width
of resonance related to Q via γ = ω0/2Q, P0 is the power
characterizing the nonlinear feedback and power confine-
ment in the defect.
2-D FDTD method with perfectly matched layer bound-
ary condition is used to simulate the performance of the
proposed switch [19]. In order to calculate the transmission
spectra of the resonator, two monitors are located at incident
and output of the structure to measure the incident and out-
put power. The transmission is normalized as T = Pout/Pin,
where Pout and Pin represent the output and incident power,
respectively.
3 Simulation and results
Figure 2a shows the transmission spectrum of output port of
the resonator. The input intensity is low enough to neglect
nonlinear effect in the cavity. The most important feature of
this spectrum is a sharp peak precisely centered at the wave-
length of 1556.32 μm. This sharp peak means that the struc-
ture acts as a narrow-band filter in specific spectrum. The
transmission at resonance peak is 0.82, and the full width
at half maximum (FWHM) of the resonance is 1.45 nm.
The corresponding load quality factor Q is 1075. The large
extinction ratio of the peak shows that the designed resona-
tor system is under the critical coupling condition. The criti-
cal coupling is obtained by optimizing the coupling distance,
lattice constant, and defect parameter of the PhC. Figure 2b
shows the electric field intensity distribution normalized
by incident light, in resonance cavity, and in linear regime.
The field distribution shows features of PhC structure, where
electric field is tightly confined in the defect between the two
waveguides. Along with the tight confinement, 24-fold field
enhancement is obtained. With combination of large field
enhancement and third-order nonlinearity effect, we are able
to decrease threshold intensity of switching and bistability
as discussed in the following.
In order to observe bistability effect, operation wave-
length should be detuned from the linear resonant wave-
length [20]. Figure 3 shows the calculated transmission
spectra around the cavity resonance at three different input
Journal of Computational Electronics
Fig. 2  a Transmission spectrum of the resonator in the linear regime. b Simulated electric field (E) at the center of the resonance mode sup-
ported by the cavity
Fig. 3  Transmission of the proposed structure for three different inci-
dent intensities
intensities. Input waveguide was excited by a TE continu-
ous wave (CW) source, and transmission spectrum was
calculated at different wavelength. At the lowest intensity
of 1 × 106 V2/m2, the resonance profile is symmetric. The
resonance wavelength redshifts, and the transmission profile
becomes asymmetrical when the increase in input intensity
results in the nonlinear Kerr effect in the cavity. When input
intensity is increased to 1.6 × 1013 V2/m2, the Lorentzian
line shape of the resonance profile deforms into a triangu-
lar one, and a sharp maximum is observed on the longer
wavelengths. This means that a Kerr-induced increase in
the effective refractive index, causes a redshift of resonant
wavelength until the stored energy of light at a given inten-
sity is sufficient to maintain the redshift. In order to observe
bistability effect, the detuning of working wavelength
should be larger than a specific value, which is shown to
be 𝛿min = 3 [20, 21]. At the input intensity of 1.6 × 1013
√
­V2/m2, the shift of resonant wavelength is 1.78 nm which
leads to δ = 2.75. This obtained detuning is larger than the
minimum required one. This big shift indicates the optical
bistability can occur in our designed defect cavity at the
incident intensity of 1.6 × 1013 ­V2/m2.
Figure 4 demonstrates the dependence of transmitted
light with an increase and decrease in incident light inten-
sity in which an obvious bistability loop can be considered
owing to enhanced third-order nonlinearity effect in the cav-
ity containing Kerr material. This bistable carves are stud-
ied at three different detuning of 2.5 (λ = 1558 nm), 3.25
(λ = 1558.5 nm), 4.1 (λ = 1559 nm). In the simulation, the
incident light is tuned to specific wavelength and the nor-
malized transmission for upward and downward sweep of
incident intensity is obtained. For example, in Fig. 4a, when
the incident intensity increases (blue curve), the transmis-
sion will turn on and increase rapidly to the higher value
at about 1.24 × 1013  V2/m2. When the incident intensity
decreases (red curve), the transmission will remain at high
values until the dropping point of about 9.42 × 1012 V2/m2.
There are two possible related output transmission at some
critical input intensity. This clear contrast between the ON
and OFF brunches is observed, indicating the optical bista-
bility in our resonator. The bistability performance largely
depends on δ [21]. The width of the loop increases as δ
decreases. At δ = 4.1, the width is 2.15 × 1013 ­V2/m2, which
decreases to 0.35 × 1013 ­V2/m2 at δ = 2.5.
In addition, the response time, which is a key parameter
for a switch, is calculated. As shown in Fig. 5, a square pulse
with the wavelength of 1558 nm is lunched to the waveguide.
The incident intensity and duration time are 1.6 × 1013 and
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 Journal of Computational Electronics

Fig. 4  Transmission as a function of incident intensity at different detuning parameter δ. The blue and red lines represent the increasing and
decreasing intensity of the incident light (Color figure online)

Fig. 5  Incident intensity of
a square pulse (red curve), and
the blue curve shows the trans-
mitted intensity of the switch
(Color figure online)

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Journal of Computational Electronics
49 ps, respectively. It is found that the response time of light
for switching up and down is 11 ps and 3 ps, respectively,
which is less than some of the previous works [5, 6, 22]. As a
result, the modulation speed can reach to 90 Gb/s. Compared
to this result, our device exhibits a fast ps switching time. It
should be added that the response time is obtained without
considering the delay time of Kerr nonlinear material, so it
originates from the feedback of the resonance. In fact, the
response time of Kerr material can affect the final response
time of our switch. If the response time of the Kerr material
is greater than 11 ps, the final response time of the device is
determined by material.
4 Conclusion
In conclusion, we studied the optical bistability effect of
a chalcogenide glass in a rectangular defect of photonic
crystal using FDTD methods. The simulation results clearly
shows that the central resonance wavelength of the switch
can be tuned by varying the incident intensity, which demon-
strates the occurrence of nonlinearity effects in the designed
structure. Both the optical bistability width and threshold of
incident intensity are closely related to the detuning param-
eter. Simulation results show that this type of bistable switch
exhibits great advantages of wide tuning range, fast speed up
to 90 Gb/s, and compact size, about 8.1 μm. Such a nonlin-
ear PhC resonator design provides a foundation for realizing
low threshold incident light intensity, fast switching time,
and practical optical modulators and switches.
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