Abstract

We demonstrate an ultrafast, all-optical, cascadable NOR-gate with a small signal gain of 4.5 and a switching energy of 30pJ. The three-terminal gate is based on soliton dragging in birefringent fibers and is appropriate for a clocked digital optical processor. When two orthogonally polarized solitons start coincident in time and travel along the two principal axes of a fiber, they interact through cross-phase modulation and try to travel as a unit. Consequently, the two solitons shift in time and move toward the mean velocity between the two axes. Even when one soliton has nine times less energy than the other soliton, the smaller pulse can time shift the larger pulse by several pulse widths. In a clocked digital optical system, the time shifts from soliton dragging translate into logic operations.

© 1989 Optical Society of America