We propose a new type of bistable device for silicon photonics, using the self-electro-optic effect within an optical cavity. Since the bistability does not depend on the intrinsic optical nonlinearity of the material, but is instead engineered by me
ans of an optoelectronic feedback, it appears at low optical powers. This bistable device satisfies all the basic criteria required in an optical switch to build a scalable digital optical computing system.
We propose a scheme to efficiently couple a single quantum dot electron spin to an optical nano-cavity, which enables us to simultaneously benefit from a cavity as an efficient photonic interface, as well as to perform high fidelity (nearly 100%) spi
n initialization and manipulation achievable in bulk semiconductors. Moreover, the presence of the cavity speeds up the spin initialization process beyond GHz.
We performed an experimental study of coupled optical cavity arrays in a photonic crystal platform. We find that the coupling between the cavities is significantly larger than the fabrication-induced disorder in the cavity frequencies. Satisfying thi
s condition is necessary for using such cavity arrays to generate strongly correlated photons, which has potential application to the quantum simulation of many-body systems.
We demonstrate the effects of cavity quantum electrodynamics for a quantum dot coupled to a photonic molecule, consisting of a pair of coupled photonic crystal cavities. We show anti-crossing between the quantum dot and the two super-modes of the pho
tonic molecule, signifying achievement of the strong coupling regime. From the anti-crossing data, we estimate the contributions of both mode-coupling and intrinsic detuning to the total detuning between the super-modes. Finally, we also show signatures of off-resonant cavity-cavity interaction in the photonic molecule.
We present experimental results showing phonon-mediated coupling between two quantum dots embedded inside a photonic crystal microcavity. With only one of the dots being spectrally close to the cavity, we observe both frequency up-conversion and down
-conversion of the pump light via a $sim1.2$ THz phonon. We demonstrate this process for both weak and strong regimes of dot-cavity coupling, and provide a simple theoretical model explaining our observations.
