Advanced all-optical logic gates on a spectral bus

Abstract

We present experimental results on a new method for ultrafast all-optical logic, which utilizes four-wave mixing on polarization-modulated signals. The technique allows advanced operations such as exclusive-or and three-bit addition with carry bit. Furthermore, we show that on-the-fly error-correction encoding and decoding of a simple Hamming code is achieved when these gates are used on the bits of a spectrally structured word. These gates may be suitable for logic operations in an optoelectronic front end, which moves some of the necessary computation of data to the optical domain, before detection.

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