Optical logic operation via plasmon-exciton interconversion in 2D semiconductors

Nanophotonic devices manipulating light for high-speed computing are a counterpart of speed-limited electronic circuits. Although plasmonic circuits are a promising platform for subwavelength miniaturization, the logic-operation principle is still limited to mimicking those of photonic waveguides using phase shifts, polarization, interference, and resonance. Meanwhile, reconfigurable interconversion between exciton and plasmon engender emerging applications like exciton transistors and multiplexers, exciton amplifiers, chiral valleytronics, and nonlinear excitonics. Here, we propose optical logic principles realized by exciton-plasmon interconversion in Ag-nanowires (NW) overlapped on transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) monolayers. Excitons generated from TMDs couple to the Ag-NW plasmons, eventually collected as output signals at the Ag-NW end. Using two lasers, we demonstrate AND gate by modulating single excitons in Ag-NW on MoS2 and a half-adder by modulating dual excitons in lateral WSe2 and WS2. Moreover, a 4-to-2 binary encoder is realized in partially overlapped MoSe2 and MoS2 using four-terminal laser inputs. Our results represent great advances in communication processing for optical photonics integrable with subwavelength architectures.