Engineering the temporal dynamics of all-optical switching with fast and slow materials.

All-optical switches control the amplitude, phase, and polarization of light using optical control pulses. They can operate at ultrafast timescales - essential for technology-driven applications like optical computing, and fundamental studies like time-reflection. Conventional all-optical switches have a fixed switching time, but this work demonstrates that the response-time can be controlled by selectively controlling the light-matter-interaction in so-called fast and slow materials. The bi-material switch has a nanosecond response when the probe interacts strongly with titanium nitride near its epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) wavelength. The response-time speeds up over two orders of magnitude with increasing probe-wavelength, as light's interaction with the faster Aluminum-doped zinc oxide (AZO) increases, eventually reaching the picosecond-scale near AZO's ENZ-regime. This scheme provides several additional degrees of freedom for switching time control, such as probe-polarization and incident angle, and the pump-wavelength. This approach could lead to new functionalities within key applications in multiband transmission, optical computing, and nonlinear optics.

Tailoring the Thickness-Dependent Optical Properties of Conducting Nitrides and Oxides for Epsilon-Near-Zero-Enhanced Photonic Applications.

The unique properties of the emerging photonic materials, conducting nitrides and oxides, especially their tailorability, large damage thresholds, and, importantly, the so-called epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) behavior, have enabled novel photonic phenomena spanning optical circuitry, tunable metasurfaces, and nonlinear optical devices. This work explores direct control of the optical properties of polycrystalline titanium nitride (TiN) and aluminum-doped zinc oxide (AZO) by tailoring the film thickness, and their potential for ENZ-enhanced photonic applications. This study demonstrates that TiN-AZO bilayers support Ferrell-Berreman modes using the thickness-dependent ENZ resonances in the AZO films operating in the telecom wavelengths spanning from 1470 to 1750 nm. The bilayer stacks also act as strong light absorbers in the ultraviolet regime using the radiative ENZ modes and the Fabry-Perot modes in the constituent TiN films. The studied Berreman resonators exhibit optically induced reflectance modulation of 15% with picosecond response time. Together with the optical response tailorability of conducting oxides and nitrides, using the field enhancement near the tunable ENZ regime can enable a wide range of nonlinear optical phenomena, including all-optical switching, time refraction, and high-harmonic generation.