Realization of All-Optical Digital Amplification in Coupled Nonlinear Photonic Crystal Waveguides

In this conceptual study, all-optical amplification of the light pulses in two weakly coupled nonlinear photonic crystal waveguides (PCWs) is proposed. We consider two adjacent PCWs, which consist of line defects in a 2D square lattice of periodically distributed circular rods made from dielectric material with Kerr-type nonlinearity. Dispersion diagrams of the PCW’s symmetric and antisymmetric modes are analyzed using a recently developed analytical formulation. The operating frequency is properly chosen to be located at the edge of the PCW’s dispersion diagram (i.e., adjacent to the photonic crystals low-energy band edge), where in the linear case no propagation modes are excited. However, in case of a nonlinear medium when the amplitude of the injected signal is above some threshold value, solitons are formed propagating inside the coupled nonlinear PCWs. The near field distributions of the propagating light pulse inside the coupled nonlinear PCWs and the output power of the received signal are numerically studied in a detail. A very good agreement between the analytic soliton solution based on the nonlinear Schrödinger equation and numerical result is obtained. Amplification coefficients are calculated for the various amplitudes of the input signals. The results vividly demonstrate the effectiveness of the weakly coupled nonlinear PCWs as an all-optical digital amplifier.