Design and Modelling of a 1×N All-Optical Nonlinear Mach-Zehnder Switch Controlled by Wavelength and Input Power

The authors propose two 1× all optical switches by taking the advantage of the accelerating behaviour of a spatial soliton in a Mach-Zehnder waveguide and the soliton's oscillating behaviour while propagating inside the nonlinear waveguide. The proposed switches consist of asymmetric and symmetric Mach-Zehnder waveguides followed by a homogenous Kerr medium, which is terminated by parallel trapezoidal waveguides. In these switches, the signal is dropped from one of the desired output channels by changing the input pulse of wavelength or power. The numerical results confirm the switching application and show that the proposed 1× switches can be used for wide ranges of wavelength and power, which are suitable for optical communication networks and optical data processing systems.