Asymmetric Spatial Soliton Dragging Logic
Optical computers will require a fundamental logical gate akin to the
VLSI transistor, and we have been investigating the interaction
between optical solitons
(tiny beads of light nonlinearly confined in 1, 2, or 3-dimensions)
for switching and logic.
We have
invented an asymmetric dragging interaction between orthogonally polarized
spatial solitons or 3+1 dimensional ``light bullets''
that pulls a strong pump out of an aperture in the presence of a weak
off-axis signal.
We have shown that this allows energy-efficient,
ultrafast, cascadable, three-terminal, phase insensitive, NOR gates with gain
to be implemented in saturable nonlinear periodic media, enabling an entirely
new generation of speed-of-light and volume parallel optical computers.
[Journal Publications:
22,
25,
Conference Publications:
32,
39,
42,
43,
46
]
Light bullet dragging movie (mpeg)
2+1D Spatiotemporal dragging (zipped mpeg)
2+1D Spatiotemporal collision movie (mpeg)
Vugraphs
Steve Blair's
Soliton Dragging Page
Undergraduate summer research opportunity
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