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Second Harmonic Generation: Toward an All-Optical Transistor

Z. Wang, D. J. Hagan, and E. W. Van Stryland, CREOL, Univ. of Central Florida, Orlando, Fla. and Gaetano Assanto, Terza University of Rome, Rome, Italy

One of the goals in the development of all-optical alternatives to electronic processing has been development of an optical equivalent to the semiconductor transistor. Different schemes have been suggested for all-optical (AO) modulators and transistors, most of them based on third-order nonlinearities. More recently, after the experiments by DeSalvo et al., attention has been paid to the cascading of second-order nonlinearities. The possibility of using cascaded quadratic effects to exploit the coherent nature of parametric interactions has spurred interest toward analog AO processes in second-order material systems, first among them the transistor.