Ultrafast all-optical wavelength conversion based on (3+1)-D optical soliton dragging interaction

Spatial dragging of optical solitons is an asymmetric interaction in which a weak signal soliton propagating at a tilted angle can drag an initially overlapping strong pump soliton with orthogonal polarization to the side, thus missing a spatial aperture at the output. A novel ultrafast all-optical wavelength converter based on (3+1)-D soliton dragging interaction between frequency shifted solitons is demonstrated in this paper using numerical simulations. This device is not rate limited by carrier life time as previously demonstrated wavelength converters and potentially can reach a bit rate of 2TB/sec. The proposed wavelength converter can be used in future multi-wavelength soliton communication network or multi-wavelength optical logic based computing systems.