Asymmetric spatial soliton dragging.
A new low-latency, cascadable optical logic gate with gain, high contrast, and three-terminal input-output isolation is introduced. The interaction between two orthogonally polarized spatial solitons brought into coincidence at the boundary of a saturating nonlinear medium and propagating in different directions results in the phase-insensitive spatial dragging of a strong pump soliton by a weaker signal. As a result, the strong pump is transmitted through an aperture when the weak signal is not present, and it is dragged to the side by more than a beam width and blocked in the presence of the weak signal, thus implementing an inverter with gain. A multi-input, logically complete NOR gate also can be implemented in a cascaded system.
S
S
Blair
K
K
Wagner
R
R
McLeod