Light Stopping and Time Reversal in Dynamic Nano-Photonic Structures via Bloch Oscillations

In this contribution a novel scheme of coherent and reversible light control in dynamic photonic structures, which does not necessarily require to maintain the translational invariance of the system, is presented. In particular, the possibility of stopping and time-reversing light pulses in a coupled-resonator optical waveguides (CROW) structure with an imposed dynamic refractive index gradient is demonstrated theoretically . In this system, light stopping and reversal is not due to adiabatic shrinking and reversal of the waveguide band structure, but it is a consequence of the coherent Bloch oscillation (BO) motion of the light pulse induced by the index gradient. It is remarkable that, though temporal and spatial BOs and related phenomena have been studied to a great extent in several linear optical systems, they have not yet been proposed as an all-optical means to stop or time-reverse light pulses.