Ultrafast All-Optical Logic Gates Based on Soliton Trapping in Fibers.

Ultrafast, all-optical soliton trapping logic gates including an inverter, exclusive-OR, and AND are experimentally demonstrated in birefringent fibers. The soliton trapping logic gates are three terminal devices with orthogonally polarized inputs, phase-insensitive nonlinear operation, and switching energies of ~ 42pJ. Using a ~ 0.2 THz band pass filter, the contrast ratio for the exclusive-OR is ~ 8:1, but the output pulses are about 10x broader than the input pulse width. To make a cascadable inverter with ~ 4:1 contrast ratio, the filter band pass was widened to ~ 0.58 THz so that the output pulses can propagate as solitons in a fiber.