Athermal third harmonic generation in micro‐ring resonators

Nonlinear high-harmonic generation in micro-resonators is a common technique used to extend the operating range of applications such as self-referencing systems and coherent communications in the visible region.However,the generated high-harmonic emissions are subject to a resonance shift with a change in temperature.We present a comprehensive study of the thermal behavior induced phase mismatch that shows this resonance shift can be compensated by a combination of the linear and nonlinear thermo-optics effects.Using this model,we predict and experimentally demonstrate visible third harmonic modes having temperature dependent wavelength shifts between−2.84 pm/ºC and 2.35 pm/ºC when pumped at the L-band.Besides providing a new way to achieve athermal operation,this also allows one to measure the thermal coefficients and Q-factor of the visible modes.Through steady state analysis,we have also identified the existence of stable athermal third harmonic generation and experimentally demonstrated orthogonally pumped visible third harmonic modes with a temperature dependent wavelength shift of 0.05 pm/ºC over a temperature range of 12ºC.Our findings promise a configurable and active temperature dependent wavelength shift compensation scheme for highly efficient and precise visible emission generation for potential 2f–3f self-referencing in metrology,biological and chemical sensing applications.

Four-wave mixing in silicon-nanocrystal embedded high-index doped silica micro-ring resonator

A nonlinear integrated optical platform that allows the fabrication of waveguide circuits with different material composition,and at small dimensions,offers advantages in terms of field enhancement and increased interaction length,thereby facilitating the observation of nonlinear optics effects at a much lower power level.To enhance the nonlinearity of the conventional waveguide structure,in this work,we propose and demonstrate a microstructured waveguide where silicon rich layer is embedded in the core of the conventional waveguide in order to increase its nonlinearity.By embedding a 20 nm thin film of silicon nanocrystal(Si-nc),we achieve a twofold increase of the nonlinear parameter,γ.The linear relationship between the fourwave mixing conversion efficiency and pump power reveals the negligible nonlinear absorption and small dispersion in the micro-ring resonators.This simple approach of embedding an ultra-thin Si-nc layer into conventional high-index doped silica dramatically increases its nonlinear performance,and could potentially find applications in all-optical processing functions.

Atom-referenced and stabilized soliton microcomb

For the applications of the frequency comb in microresonators,it is essential to obtain a fully frequency-stabilized microcomb laser source.In this study,we present a system for generating a fully atom-referenced stabilized soliton microcomb.The pump light around 1560.48 nm is locked to an ultra-low-expansion(ULE)cavity.This pump light is then frequency-doubled and referenced to the atomic transition of87Rb.The repetition rate of the soliton microcomb is injection-locked to an atomic-clockstabilized radio frequency(RF)source,leading to mHz stabilization at 1 s.As a result,all comb lines have been frequencystabilized based on the atomic reference and the ULE cavity,achieving a very high precision of approximately 18 Hz at 1 s,corresponding to the frequency stability of 9.5×10^(-14).Our approach provides a fully stabilized microcomb experiment scheme with no requirement of f-2f technique,which could be easily implemented and generalized to various photonic platforms,thus paving the way towards the ultraprecise optical sources for high precision spectroscopy.

CMOS-compatible high-index doped silica waveguide with an embedded silicon-nanocrystal strip for all-optical analog-to-digital conversion

Passive all-optical signal processors that overcome the electronic bottleneck can potentially be the enabling components for the next-generation high-speed and lower power consumption systems. Here, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a CMOS-compatible waveguide and its application to the all-optical analog-to-digital converter(ADC) under the nonlinear spectral splitting and filtering scheme. As the key component of the proposed ADC, a 50 cm long high-index doped silica glass spiral waveguide is composed of a thin silicon-nanocrystal(Si-nc) layer embedded in the core center for enhanced nonlinearity. The device simultaneously possesses low loss(0.16 dB/cm at 1550 nm), large nonlinearity(305 W^-1∕km at 1550 nm), and negligible nonlinear absorption.A 2-bit ADC basic unit is achieved when pumped by the proposed waveguide structure at the telecom band and without any additional amplification. Simulation results that are consistent with the experimental ones are also demonstrated, which further confirm the feasibility of the proposed scheme for larger quantization resolution.This demonstrated approach enables a fully monolithic solution for all-optical ADC in the future, which can digitize broadband optical signals directly at low power consumption. This has great potential on the applications of high-speed optical communications, networks, and signal processing systems.

On-chip frequency combs and telecommunications signal processing meet quantum optics

Entangled optical quantum states are essential towards solving questions in fundamental physics and are at the heart of applications in quantum information science. For advancing the research and development of quantum technologies, practical access to the generation and manipulation of photon states carrying significant quantum resources is required. Recently, integrated photonics has become a leading platform for the compact and cost- efficient generation and processing of optical quantum states. Despite significant advances, most on-chip non- classical light sources are still limited to basic bi-photon systems formed by two-dimensional states （i.e., qubits）. An interesting approach beating large potential is the use of the time or frequency domain to enabled the scalable on- chip generation of complex states. In this manuscript, we review recent efforts in using on-chip optical frequency combs for quantum state generation and telecommunica- tions components for their coherent control. In particular, the generation of bi- and multi-photon entangled qubit states has been demonstrated, based on a discrete time domain approach. Moreover, the on-chip generation of high-dimensional entangled states （quDits） has recentlybeen realized, wherein the photons are created in a coherent superposition of multiple pure frequency modes. The time- and frequency-domain states formed with on-chip frequency comb sources were coherently manipulated via off-the-shelf telecommunications compo- nents. Our results suggest that microcavity-based entangled photon states and their coherent control using accessible telecommunication infrastructures can open up new venues for scalable quantum information science.