Controllable transmission photonic band gap and all-optical switching behaviors of 1-D InAs/GaAs quantum-dot photonic crystal

Transmission optical properties of one-dimensional (1-D) InAs/GaAs quantum-dot photonic crystal (QD-PC), composed of 400 elementary cells, were analyzed by using transfer matrix method. In our calculations, a homogeneous broadening with temperature and other inhomogeneous broadening with quantum dot (QD) size fluctuations are introduced. Our results show that a large optical Stark shift occurs at the high energy edge of the transmission photonic band-gap (TPBG) when, which exhibits the function of light with light, an external laser field acts resonantly on the excitons in the InAs QDs. Utilized this TPBG based on the pump-probe geometry, an all-optical switch can be constructed and the on-off switching extinction ratio (SER) is varied with both the temperature and the inhomogeneity of QDs. Significantly, it still maintains switching behavior and can process the data sequence of return-to-zero codes of 250 Gb/s even if the QD standard deviation of relative size fluctuations (SD-RSF) is up to 3% and the temperature is at 100 K.