Mach–Zehnder interferometer-based all-optical reversible logic gate

In recent years, reversible logic has emerged as a promising computing paradigm having application in low-power CMOS, quantum computing, nanotechnology and optical computing. Optical logic gates have the potential to work at macroscopic (light pulses carry information), or quantum (single photons carry information) levels with great efficiency. However, relatively little has been published on designing reversible logic circuits in all-optical domain. In this paper, we propose and design a novel scheme of Toffoli and Feynman gates in all-optical domain. We have described their principle of operations and used a theoretical model to assist this task, finally confirming through numerical simulations. Semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA)-based Mach–Zehnder interferometer (MZI) can play a significant role in this field of ultra-fast all-optical signal processing. The all-optical reversible circuits presented in this paper will be useful to perform different arithmetic (full adder, BCD adder) and logical (realization of Boolean function) operations in the domain of reversible logic-based information processing.