An XOR/XNOR optical logic circuit with two cascaded microring resonators and two U-bend waveguides is proposed. The microring resonators are made of electro-optical polymer and modulated through linear electro-optical effect. Two electrical signals are applied to the two microrings, and simultaneous XOR and XNOR operations are demonstrated in two different operating modes. We also use scattering matrix method to analyze the analog output spectra, and find that different inputs like ‘00' and ‘11' can lead to different extinction ratios in output spectra at certain wavelengths, even though their digital outputs are the same.
A novel nanolaser structure based on a hybrid plasmonic waveguide is proposed and investigated. The coupling between the metal nanowire and the high-index semiconductor nanowire with optical gain leads to a strong field enhancement in the air gap region and low propagation loss, which enables the realization of lasing at the deep subwavelength scale.By optimizing the geometric parameters of the structure, a minimal lasing threshold is achieved while maintaining the capacity of ultra-deep subwavelength mode confinement. Compared with the previous coupled nanowire pair based hybrid plasmonic structure, a lower threshold can be obtained with the same geometric parameters. The proposed nanolaser can be integrated into a miniature chip as a nanoscale light source and has the potential to be widely used in optical communication and optical sensing technology.
