Femtojoule optical Kerr switching with milliwatt-peak-power in silicon-organic hybrid nanocavity
Yizheng Chen, Xiaoyan Gao, Gaoneng Dong, Wentao Gu, Jianhua Ning, Wentao Ye, Yilun Wang, Wenchan Dong, Lei Lei, Jing Xu, Xinliang Zhang · 2026
Read Femtojoule optical Kerr switching with milliwatt-peak-power in silicon-organic hybrid nanocavity by Yizheng Chen, Xiaoyan Gao, Gaoneng Dong, Wentao Gu, Jianhua Ning, Wentao Ye, Yilun Wang, Wenchan Dong, Lei Lei, Jing Xu, Xinliang Zhang (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-13376617.txt.
Description
Yizheng Chen and co-authors build a light switch of extreme thrift in a 2026 paper. All-optical switches flip signals with light alone and can work at ultrafast speeds, which future communication and computing systems need. Their weakness is the faintness of the effect they rely on, the Kerr effect, which usually demands high energy pulses that do not fit steady data streams.
Their switch squeezes light into a tiny hybrid cavity, part silicon and part organic polymer with a strong nonlinear response. That tight trap plus the eager material cuts the needed energy to a few millionths of a billionth of a joule, with peak power in the milliwatt range. Unlike earlier low-energy demos, it works with mainstream communication signals at a high duty cycle. The result brings a lab curiosity closer to real networks.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Yizheng Chen, Xiaoyan Gao, Gaoneng Dong, Wentao Gu, Jianhua Ning, Wentao Ye, Yilun Wang, Wenchan Dong, Lei Lei, Jing Xu, Xinliang Zhang |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 37 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |