Actively MEMS-Based Tunable Metamaterials for Advanced and Emerging Applications

In recent years, tunable metamaterials have attracted intensive research interest due to their outstanding characteristics, which are dependent on the geometrical dimensions rather than the material composition of the nanostructure. Among tuning approaches, micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) is a well-known technology that mechanically reconfigures the metamaterial unit cells. In this study, the development of MEMS-based metamaterial is reviewed and analyzed based on several types of actuators, including electrothermal, electrostatic, electromagnetic, and stretching actuation mechanisms. The moveable displacement and driving power are the key factors in evaluating the performance of actuators. Therefore, a comparison of actuating methods is offered as a basic guideline for selecting micro-actuators integrated with metamaterial. Additionally, by exploiting electro-mechanical inputs, MEMS-based metamaterials make possible the manipulation of incident electromagnetic waves, including amplitude, frequency, phase, and the polarization state, which enables many implementations of potential applications in optics. In particular, two typical applications of MEMS-based tunable metamaterials are reviewed, i.e., logic operation and sensing. These integrations of MEMS with metamaterial provide a novel route for the enhancement of conventional optical devices and exhibit great potentials in innovative applications, such as intelligent optical networks, invisibility cloaks, photonic signal processing, and so on.

Design and Simulation of Physical Layer Security for Next Generation Intelligent Optical Networks

With the latest technological advancements and attractive features of next generation intelligent optical networks such as high bandwidth, low power consumption, and low transmission loss, etc., they have been considered as most viable solution to satisfy promptly growing bandwidth demands. However, main optical network components bring forth a set of security challenges and reliability issues, accompanied by new vulnerabilities within the network. This paper proposes a new design for an optical encryption and decryption method for enhancing optical network security using p-i-n photodiode which generates Pseudo Random Binary Sequence (PRBS) as a shot noise fluctuations and wavelength converter based design using Semiconductor Optical Amplifier (SOA) based XOR gate which utilizes Cross-Phase Modulation (XPM). The system performance based on Bit Error Rate (BER) and Q factor are analyzed at different data rates for different link lengths up to 100 km using OptiSystem. It is observed that error free transmission with a BER of 10-12 is achieved a data rate of 10Gbps for a link length of only 30 Km for the system with PIN photodiode’s shot noise being used for PRBS sequence generation. However, wavelength conversion based system enables transmission of signal at 10Gbps signal up to a link length of 90Km.