Abstract

There is a growing interest in the use of ultrafast, nonlinear optical devices as potential signal processing elements in future telecommunications systems. One of the most promising materials for such devices is AlGaAs, operated at half the band gap. To date a number of integrated, nonlinear, all-optical switching devices have been demonstrated, for example, directional couplers[1], Mach-Zehnder interferometers[2] and X-junctions[3]. However, the experimental results reported have concentrated on single nonlinear elements. In order to make practical nonlinear elements, for information switching and signal processing, a number of devices must be connected in series to perform different tasks. In this submission we report on the first experimental observation of switching in two cascaded directional couplers.

© 1995 Optical Society of America