Groundbreaking optical device could enhance optical information processing, computers

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In an optical diode, the light input in one direction is transmitted while the light input in the opposite direction is blocked. The new optical diode, designed by Lan Yang and her collaborators, is made from parity-time (PT) symmetric microresonators in which loss of one of the resonators is balanced by the gain in the other.  Breaking the PT-symmetry, by tuning the coupling strength between the resonators, leads to strong field localization and hence enables nonlinearity-based one-way transmission for light.       At St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, a section of the dome called the Whispering Gallery makes a whisper audible from the other side of the dome as a result of the way sound waves travel around the curved surface. Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have used the same phenomenon to build an optical device that may lead to new and more powerful computers that run faster and cooler.   Lan Yang   Lan Yang, PhD, associate professor of electrical and systems engineering, and her collaborators have developed an essential component of these new computers that would run on light. Their work brings predictions from recently formulated theoretical physics into real world applications.   The results

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