Nonlinear optics of photonic hyper-crystals: optical limiting and hyper-computing

Photonic hyper-crystals combine the most interesting features of hyperbolic metamaterials and photonic crystals. Since the dispersion law of extraordinary photons in hyperbolic metamaterials does not exhibit the usual diffraction limit, photonic hyper-crystals exhibit light localization on deep subwavelength scales, leading to considerable enhancement of nonlinear photon–photon interaction. Therefore, similar to their conventional photonic crystal counterparts, nonlinear photonic hyper-crystals appear to be very promising in optical limiting and optical computing applications. Nonlinear optics of photonic hyper-crystals may be formulated in such a way that one of the spatial coordinates would play a role of effective time in a 2+1-dimensional “optical space-time” describing light propagation in the hyper-crystal. Mapping the conventional optical computing onto nonlinear optics of photonic hyper-crystals results in a “hyper-computing” scheme, which may considerably accelerate computation time.