Photon trapping and transfer with solitons

Abstract

We show, numerically, that a single photon trapped by a soliton in a Kerr nonlinear medium can be transferred from one soliton to another when the captor soliton undergoes collision with a second soliton. Soliton collisions can also be used in this way to realize a beam splitter, as well as a mode-separating beam splitter, analogous to the usual polarizing beam splitter. We discuss briefly the feasibility of an optical fiber implementation and possible applications to quantum-information processing. © 2009 The American Physical Society.