New Optical Switch Could Lead to Ultrafast All-Optical Signal Processing

July 30, 2022

An artist's illustration of an optical switch, splitting light pulses based on their energies.

One of the major limitations of optics-based systems at present is that, at a certain point, they still need to have electronics-based transistors to efficiently process the data. Now, a team led by Alireza Marandi, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics, has created an all-optical switch. Such a switch could eventually enable data processing using photons. Device nanofabrication was performed at the Kavli Nanoscience Institute (KNI) at Caltech. [Caltech story]