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Register a new userNonvolatile electrically reconfigurable integrated photonic switch
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Reconfigurability of photonic integrated circuits (PICs) has become increasingly important due to the growing demands for electronic-photonic systems on a chip driven by emerging applications, including neuromorphic computing, quantum information, and microwave photonics. Success in these fields usually requires highly scalable photonic switching units as essential building blocks. Current photonic switches, however, mainly rely on materials with weak, volatile thermo-optic or electro-optic modulation effects, resulting in a large footprint and high energy consumption. As a promising alternative, chalcogenide phase-change materials (PCMs) exhibit strong modulation in a static, self-holding fashion. Here, we demonstrate nonvolatile electrically reconfigurable photonic switches using PCM-clad silicon waveguides and microring resonators that are intrinsically compact and energy-efficient. With phase transitions actuated by in-situ silicon PIN heaters, near-zero additional loss and reversible switching with high endurance are obtained in a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS)-compatible process. Our work can potentially enable very large-scale general-purpose programmable integrated photonic processors.
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Active metasurfaces promise reconfigurable optics with drastically improved compactness, ruggedness, manufacturability, and functionality compared to their traditional bulk counterparts. Optical phase change materials (O-PCMs) offer an appealing material solution for active metasurface devices with their large index contrast and nonvolatile switching characteristics. Here we report what we believe to be the first electrically reconfigurable nonvolatile metasurfaces based on O-PCMs. The O-PCM alloy used in the devices, Ge2Sb2Se4Te1 (GSST), uniquely combines giant non-volatile index modulation capability, broadband low optical loss, and a large reversible switching volume, enabling significantly enhanced light-matter interactions within the active O-PCM medium. Capitalizing on these favorable attributes, we demonstrated continuously tunable active metasurfaces with record half-octave spectral tuning range and large optical contrast of over 400%. We further prototyped a polarization-insensitive phase-gradient metasurface to realize dynamic optical beam steering.
We report a compact, scalable, quantum photonic integrated circuit realised by combining multiple, independent InGaAs/GaAs quantum-light-emitting-diodes (QLEDs) with a silicon oxynitride waveguide circuit. Each waveguide joining the circuit can then be excited by a separate, independently electrically contacted QLED. We show that the emission from neighbouring QLEDs can be independently tuned to degeneracy using the Stark Effect and that the resulting photon streams are indistinguishable. This enables on-chip Hong-Ou-Mandel-type interference, as required for many photonic quantum information processing schemes.
We propose and investigate the performance of integrated photonic isolators based on non-reciprocal mode conversion facilitated by unidirectional, traveling acoustic waves. A triply-guided waveguide system on-chip, comprising two optical modes and an electrically-driven acoustic mode, facilitates the non-reciprocal mode conversion and is combined with modal filters to create the isolator. The co-guided and co-traveling arrangement enables isolation with no additional optical loss, without magnetic-optic materials, and low power consumption. The approach is theoretically evaluated and simulations predict over 20 dB of isolation and 2.6 dB of insertion loss with 370 GHz optical bandwidth and a 1 cm device length. The isolator utilizes only 1 mW of electrical drive power, an improvement of 1-3 orders of magnitude over the state-of-the-art. The electronic driving and lack of magneto-optic materials suggest the potential for straightforward integration with the drive circuitry, possibly in monolithic CMOS technology, enabling a fully contained `black box optical isolator with two optical ports and DC electrical power.
Progress in integrated nanophotonics has enabled large-scale programmable photonic integrated circuits (PICs) for general-purpose electronic-photonic systems on a chip. Relying on the weak, volatile thermo-optic or electro-optic effects, such systems usually exhibit limited reconfigurability along with high energy consumption and large footprints. These challenges can be addressed by resorting to chalcogenide phase-change materials (PCMs) such as Ge2Sb2Te5 (GST) that provide substantial optical contrast in a self-holding fashion upon phase transitions. However, current PCM-based integrated photonic applications are limited to single devices or simple PICs due to the poor scalability of the optical or electrical self-heating actuation approaches. Thermal-conduction heating via external electrical heaters, instead, allows large-scale integration and large-area switching, but fast and energy-efficient electrical control is yet to show. Here, we model electrical switching of GST-clad integrated nanophotonic structures with graphene heaters based on the programmable GST-on-silicon platform. Thanks to the ultra-low heat capacity and high in-plane thermal conductivity of graphene, the proposed structures exhibit a high switching speed of ~80 MHz and high energy efficiency of 19.2 aJ/nm^3 (6.6 aJ/nm^3) for crystallization (amorphization) while achieving complete phase transitions to ensure strong attenuation (~6.46 dB/micron) and optical phase (~0.28 dB/micron at 1550 nm) modulation. Compared with indium tin oxide and silicon p-i-n heaters, the structures with graphene heaters display two orders of magnitude higher figure of merits for heating and overall performance. Our work facilitates the analysis and understanding of the thermal-conduction heating-enabled phase transitions on PICs and supports the development of the future large-scale PCM-based electronic-photonic systems.
Valley pseudospin, a new degree of freedom in photonic lattices, provides an intriguing way to manipulate photons and enhance the robustness of optical networks. Here we experimentally demonstrated topological waveguiding, refracting, resonating, and routing of valley-polarized photons in integrated circuits. Specifically, we show that at the domain wall between photonic crystals of different topological valley phases, there exists a topologically protected valley kink state that is backscattering-free at sharp bends and terminals. We further harnessed these valley kink states for constructing high-Q topological photonic crystal cavities with tortuously shaped cavity geometries. We also demonstrated a novel optical routing scheme at an intersection of multiple valley kink states, where light splits counterintuitively due to the valley pseudospin of photons. These results will not only lead to robust optical communication and signal processing, but also open the door for fundamental research of topological photonics in areas such as lasing, quantum photon-pair generation, and optomechanics.
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