Ultrafast all-optical computing is essential for overcoming the speed and efficiency limitations of electronic systems, enabling rapid data processing and transmission with minimal energy consumption. The main challenges in all-optical computing include developing materials with strong, fast, and reversible nonlinear optical properties, as currently used materials often require high power and lack durability. Managing optical losses and maintaining signal integrity over distances and components is crucial, necessitating low-loss waveguides and efficient light confinement. Integrating nanoscale optical components with high precision and miniaturization demands advanced fabrication techniques and innovative designs for scalable all-optical circuits. Developing novel materials with enhanced nonlinear optical properties, including organic materials, graphene, plasmonic nanostructures, transition metal dichalcogenides, MXenes, and advanced metal–organic frameworks, can significantly improve the performance of optical switches and logic gates.
In this paper, we present a theoretical model and comprehensive analysis of ultrafast transitions between reverse saturable absorption and saturable absorption in CoTCPP surface-supported metal–organic framework (SURMOF) nanofilms with femtosecond (fs) laser pulses at 400 nm.
The effects of laser input intensity, thickness, concentration, and nonlinear absorption coefficients on transmittance have been studied to optimize all-optical switching in recently reported CoTCPP SURMOF nanofilms. We demonstrate ultralow-power and ultrahigh-contrast all-optical switching in SURMOF nanofilms and use the results to design all-optical fs AND, OR, NOT, universal NOR, and NAND logic gates. The percentage modulation of the Boolean all-optical NAND logic gate with CoTCPP SURMOF nanofilms is greater compared to MoTe2 nanofilms and BODIPY derivative compound ZL-61. A passive photonic diode with CoTCPP/ZL-61 has also been designed, which results in a nonreciprocity of 17 dB.
Based on CoTCPP SURMOF nanofilms, various combinational circuits that include an adder, subtractor, multiplexer, and encoder can be designed and explored using ultrafast all-optical logic gates. The remarkable nonlinear optical properties of CoTCPP SURMOFs open exciting prospects for ultrafast all-optical computing.
