  All-optical switching based on optical nonlinearity must undergo complex
processes of light-mater interaction in atom and electron scale, so a relative
high power and long response time is required, that construct main bottlenecks
in all-optical technology. In this paper, we propose a new mechanism for
building all-optical switching based on a change resonance modes of meta-atoms
in metamaterials, not involved optical nonlinearity of materials. A
metamaterial composed of cubic dielectric meta-atoms periodically embedded in a
background matrix is designed and constructed. All-optical switch functionality
by modulating the resonance modes in meta-atoms utilizing a vertical direction
switch light whose power is the same value with that of the signal light is
demonstrated in microwave range theoretically and experimentally. This results
represent a significant step towards obtaining all-optical switching devices
with extremely low threshold power and high switching speed.
