Demonstration of ultrafast and energy-efficient all-optical switching with graphene and plasmonic waveguides

Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation and Tokyo Institute of Technology have demonstrated an ultrafast all-optical switching operation with the lowest energy consumption ever reported for all-optical switching at less than one picosecond (one trillionth of a second). The current achievement combines an ultrasmall optical waveguide with a height and width of a few dozen nanometers, called a plasmonic waveguide1, with graphene2, a material that shows great promise for nonlinear optics.