Control of slow-light effect in a metamaterial-loaded Si waveguide

A metamaterial is an artificial material designed to control the electric permittivity and magnetic permeability freely beyond naturally existing values. A promising application is a slow-light device realized using a combination of optical waveguides and metamaterials. This paper proposes a method to dynamically control the slow-light effect in a metamaterial-loaded Si waveguide. In this method, the slow-light effect (i.e., group index) is controlled by changing the phase of the control light incident on the device from a direction opposite to that of the signal light. The group index of the device could be continuously controlled from 63.6 to 4.2 at a wavelength of 1.55 µm.