Abstract

Since the early days of nonlinear integrated optics, a lot of interest has been put towards studying the propagation of light in media with non uniform nonlinearities. In these early papers, the cladding, substrate, and the waveguide layers were either linear or nonlinear. Contrarily to most all-optical switches, these highly nonlinear waveguides work because of the change in the shape of the field caused by the nonlinearity, whereas in most switches the field shape does not vary much. The recent work on the disordering of multiple quantum wells (MQW) has revealed that the nonlinearity of a MQW layer can be locally reduced in the MQW plane by as much as 60% [1]. This result makes the observation of highly nonlinear waveguide phenomena possible in AlGaAs at half the band gap.

© 1996 Optical Society of America