All-optical tunable slow-light based on an analogue of electromagnetically induced transparency in a hybrid metamaterial
Chengju Ma, Yuebin Zhang, Yao Zhang, Shiqian Bao, Jiasheng Jin, Mi Li, Dongming Li, Yinggang Liu, Yiping Xu
Abstract
We demonstrate and analyze the use of metamaterials featuring an analogue of electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) in slow light technology. For most metamaterials, EIT-like effects suffer from intrinsic ohmic loss, and the metamaterial-based slow-light effect can only be tuned passively, which limits their application in slow light devices. We propose a hybrid metamaterial with a unit cell composed of a ring resonator formed from photoactive silicon (Si) and a rectangular bar formed from metallic silver (Ag). Based on an analogue of EIT in the designed hybrid metamaterial, we theoretically demonstrate an all-optical tunable slow-light effect in the telecommunication window. We successfully demonstrate the possibility of designing novel all-optical tunable chip-scale slow-light devices that could be used in optical buffering.