Broadband Coherent Wave Control Through Photonic Collisions at Time Interfaces
Abstract
Coherent wave control exploits the interference among multiple waves impinging on a system to suppress or enhance outgoing signals based on their relative phase and amplitude. This process inherently requires non-Hermiticity, in order to enable energy exchanges among the waves, and spatial interfaces in order to tailor their scattering. Here we explore the temporal analogue of this phenomenon, based on time-interfaces that support instantaneous non-Hermitian scattering events for photons analogous to mechanical collisions. Based on this mechanism, we demonstrate ultra-broadband temporal coherent wave control and photonic collisions with phase-tunable elastic features, and apply them to erase, enhance and reshape arbitrary pulses by suitably tailoring the amplitude and phase of counterpropagating signals. Our findings provide a pathway to effectively sculpt broadband light with light without requiring spatial boundaries, within an ultrafast and low-energy platform.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2212.02647,
title = {Broadband Coherent Wave Control Through Photonic Collisions at Time Interfaces},
author = {Emanuele Galiffi and Gengyu Xu and Shixiong Yin and Hady Moussa and Younes Radi and Andrea Alù},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2212.02647},
year = {2022}
}