Passive fiber ring resonators synchronously pumped by cw trains of ultrashort pulses are shown to exhibit polarization symmetry breaking. Application of this feature to all-optical storage is considered. The proposed storage device operates in the flip-flop mode which makes possible all-optical writing and erasing operations on individual bits. Numerical simulations suggest that a storage capacity of the order of thousand bits could be attainable at bit rates of hundreds of Gb/s with a maximum information processing rate of several Gb/s

Peer Reviewed