Low‐Power and Ultrafast All‐Optical Tunable Nanometer‐Scale Photonic Metamaterials

Abstract

A nanometer-scale all-optical tunable photonic metamaterial is realized by combining non-linearity enhancement associated with photonic band resonance and quantum confinement. A positive-to-negative switching of the effective dielectric constant is achieved. The operating pump power is reduced by three orders of magnitude, while an ultrafast response time on the order of picoseconds and large tunability are maintained.