Abstract

Only a few existing materials have been found to fulfill the nonlinear/transparency trade-off for ultrafast nonlinear alloptical switching in the relevant telecommunication windows at muiti-Gbit/s. The inability of finding advanced highly nonlinear materials with a high enough optical nonlinearities has lead to a radical new approach to the nonlinear optical switching problem. A tremendous advance in second-order nonlinear optical materials and device engineering has lead to a rapid demonstration of "cascading" device concepts such as nonlinear Mach - Zehnders in an integrated waveguide form, nonlinear directional couplers, spatial solitons in planar waveguides, as well as all-optical switching and solitary waves in bulk materials.

© 1996 Optical Society of America