All-optical transmission modulation due to inelastic interactions of ultrashort pulses in a disordered resonant medium

Random resonant media being one of the possible realizations of disordered metamaterials open a room of opportunities for achieving new fundamental effects and designing advanced nanophotonic devices. Strongly nonlinear optical properties of such media attract ever increasing attention nowadays from both theoretical and experimental points of view. Hereinafter we consider the case of the photonic-crystal-like structure with a randomly varying light-matter coupling provided by the random density of quantum particles. Using numerical solution of the Maxwell-Bloch equations, we study the effects of the pulse collisions in the medium. It is shown that disorder enables the qualitative changes of the system's response for copropagating pulses, whereas this is not the case for the counterpropagating ones. We propose the scheme for an all-optical transmission modulation due to the disorder-induced inelasticity of collisions of co-propagating pulses. The ability of the precise tuning the modulation via the inter-pulse distance and background refractive index adjustment is revealed. This novel approach for light control could be utilized for some highly demanded applications, such as modulation and switching of a pulsed radiation.

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