Broadband coherent wave control through photonic collisions at time interfaces

: Coherent wave control exploits the interference among multiple waves impinging on a system to suppress or enhance outgoing signals based on their relative phase and amplitude. This process inherently requires the combination of non-Hermiticity, in order to enable energy exchanges among the waves, and spatial interfaces in order to tailor their scattering. Here we explore the temporal analogue of this phenomenon, based on time-interfaces that support instantaneous non-Hermitian scattering events for photons. Based on this mechanism, we demonstrate ultra-broadband temporal coherent wave control and the photonic analogue of mechanical collisions with phase-tunable elastic features. We apply them to erase, enhance and reshape arbitrary pulses by suitably tailoring the amplitude and phase of counterpropagating signals. Our findings provide a pathway to effectively sculpt broadband light with light without requiring spatial boundaries, within an ultrafast and low-energy platform. One-Sentence Summary: Temporal coherent wave control and collisions between photons are introduced and demonstrated at time-interfaces in a transmission-line metamaterial.

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