Recent Advances in Graphene-Assisted Nonlinear Optical Signal Processing

Possessing a variety of remarkable optical, electronic, and mechanical properties, graphene has emerged as an attractive material for a myriad of optoelectronic applications. The wonderful optical properties of graphene afford multiple functions of graphene based polarizers, modulators, transistors, and photodetectors. So far, the main focus has been on graphene based photonics and optoelectronics devices. Due to the linear band structure allowing interband optical transitions at all photon energies, graphene has remarkably large third-order optical susceptibility , which is only weakly dependent on the wavelength in the near-infrared frequency range. The graphene-assisted four-wave mixing (FWM) based wavelength conversions have been experimentally demonstrated. So, we believe that the potential applications of graphene also lie in nonlinear optical signal processing, where the combination of its unique large nonlinearities and dispersionless over the wavelength can be fully exploited. In this review article, we give a brief overview of our recent progress in graphene-assisted nonlinear optical device and their applications, including degenerate FWM based wavelength conversion of quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK) signal, phase conjugated wavelength conversion by degenerate FWM and transparent wavelength conversion by nondegenerate FWM, two-input and three-input high-base optical computing, and high-speed gate-tunable terahertz coherent perfect absorption (CPA) using a split-ring graphene.

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