Advances in lithium niobate photonics:development status and perspectives

Lithium niobate(LN)has experienced significant developments during past decades due to its versatile properties,especially its large electro-optic(EO)coefficient.For example,bulk LN-based modulators with high speeds and a superior linearity are widely used in typical fiber-optic communication systems.However,with everincreasing demands for signal transmission capacity,the high power and large size of bulk LN-based devices pose great challenges,especially when one of its counterparts,integrated silicon photonics,has experienced dramatic developments in recent decades.Not long ago,high-quality thin-film LN on insulator(LNOI)became commercially available,which has paved the way for integrated LN photonics and opened a hot research area of LN photonics devices.LNOI allows a large refractive index contrast,thus light can be confined within a more compact structure.Together with other properties of LN,such as nonlinear/acousto-optic/pyroelectric effects,various kinds of high-performance integrated LN devices can be demonstrated.A comprehensive summary of advances in LN photonics is provided.As LN photonics has experienced several decades of development,our review includes some of the typical bulk LN devices as well as recently developed thin film LN devices.In this way,readers may be inspired by a complete picture of the evolution of this technology.We first introduce the basic material properties of LN and several key processing technologies for fabricating photonics devices.After that,various kinds of functional devices based on different effects are summarized.Finally,we give a short summary and perspective of LN photonics.We hope this review can give readers more insight into recent advances in LN photonics and contribute to the further development of LN related research.

Silicon substrate-integrated hollow waveguide for miniaturized optical gas sensing

Gas sensors have a wide variety of applications.Among various existing gas sensing technologies,optical gas sensors have outstanding advantages.The development of the Internet of Things and consumer electronics has put stringent requirements on miniaturized gas sensing technology.Here,we demonstrate a chip-scale silicon substrate-integrated hollow waveguide(Si-iHWG) to serve as an optical channel and gas cell in an optical gas sensor.It is fabricated through silicon wafer etching and wafer bonding.The Si-i HWG chip is further assembled with an off-chip light source and detector to build a fully functional compact nondispersive infrared(NDIR) CO_(2) sensor.The chip size is 10 mm × 9 mm,and the dimension of the sensor excluding the microcontroller board is 50 mm × 25 mm × 16 mm.This chip solution with compactness,versatility,robustness,and low cost provides a cost-effective platform for miniaturized optical sensing applications ranging from air quality monitoring to con-sumer electronics.