Actively coupled optical waveguides

Abstract

We consider light propagation through a pair of nonlinear optical waveguides with absorption, placed in a medium with power gain. The active medium boosts the in-phase component of the overlapping evanescent fields of the guides, while the nonlinearity of the guides couples it to the damped out-of-phase component creating a feedback loop. As a result, the structure exhibits stable stationary and oscillatory regimes in a wide range of gain-loss ratios. We show that the pair of actively-coupled ($\mathcal{AC}$) waveguides can act as a stationary or integrate-and-fire comparator sensitive to tiny differences in their input powers.