2013/12/31 by Tom Strudley, Roman Bruck, Ben Mills +2 · 1 citation
Engineering · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Femtosecond #Laser #Metamaterials and Metasurfaces Applications #Multi-mode optical fiber #Nanophotonics #Nonlinear Optical Materials Studies #Nonlinear Photonic Systems #Nonlinear optics #Photonics #Supercontinuum #Ultrashort pulse #Wavefront #cond-mat.dis-nn #cond-mat.mes-hall #physics.optics
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/lsa.2014.88
published as Light: Science & Applications 3, e207 (2014) · 18 pages, 6 figures
openalex publication_date 2014/09/26 · arxiv created 2014/09/28 · arxiv updated 2014/09/30 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Abstract We demonstrate a new concept for reconfigurable nanophotonic devices exploiting ultrafast nonlinear control of shaped wavefronts in a multimode nanomaterial consisting of semiconductor nanowires. Femtosecond pulsed laser excitation of the nanowire mat is shown to provide an efficient nonlinear mechanism to control both destructive and constructive interference in a shaped wavefront. Modulations of up to 63% are induced by optical pumping, due to a combination of multimode dephasing and induced transient absorption. We show that part of the nonlinear phase dynamics can be inverted to provide a dynamical revival of the wavefront into an optimized spot with up to 18% increase of the peak to background ratio caused by pulsed laser excitation. The concepts of multimode nonlinear switching demonstrated here are generally extendable to other photonic and plasmonic systems and enable new avenues for ultrafast and reconfigurable nanophotonic devices.