No Arabic abstract
Frequency microcombs, successors to mode-locked laser and fiber combs, enable miniature rulers of light for applications including precision metrology, molecular fingerprinting, and exoplanet discoveries. To enable the frequency ruling function, microcombs must be stabilized by locking their carrier-envelop offset frequency. So far, the microcomb stabilization remains compounded by the elaborate optics external to the chip, thus evading its scaling benefit. To address this challenge, here we demonstrate a nanophotonic chip solution based on aluminum nitride thin films, which simultaneously offer optical Kerr nonlinearity for generating octave soliton combs and Pockels nonlinearity for enabling heterodyne detection of the offset frequency. The agile dispersion control of crystalline III-Nitride photonics permits high-fidelity generation of solitons with features including 1.5-octave comb span, dual dispersive waves, and sub-terahertz repetition rates down to 220 gigahertz. These attractive characteristics, aided by on-chip phase-matched aluminum nitride waveguides, allow the full determination of the offset frequency. Our proof-of-principle demonstration represents an important milestone towards fully-integrated self-locked microcombs for portable optical atomic clocks and frequency synthesizers.
Advances in the field of plasmonics, that is, nanophotonics based on optical properties of metal nanostructures, paved the way for the development of ultrasensitive biological sensors and other devices whose operating principles are based on localization of an electromagnetic field at the nanometer scale. However, high dissipative losses of metal nanostructures limit their performance in many modern areas, including metasurfaces, metamaterials, and optical interconnections, which required the development of new devices that combine them with high refractive index dielectric nanoparticles. Resulting metal-dielectric (hybrid) nanostructures demonstrated many superior properties from the point of view of practical application, including moderate dissipative losses, resonant optical magnetic response, strong nonlinear optical properties, which made the development in this field the vanguard of the modern light science. This review is devoted to the current state of theoretical and experimental studies of hybrid metal-dielectric nanoantennas and nanostructures based on them, capable of selective scattering light waves, amplifying and transmitting optical signals in the desired direction, controlling the propagation of such signals, and generating optical harmonics.
This article presents the use of flexible carbon substrates for the growth of III-nitride nanowire light emitters. A dense packing of gallium nitride nanowires were grown on a carbon paper substrate. The nanowires grew predominantly along the a-plane direction, normal to the local surface of the carbon paper. Strong photo- and electro-luminescence was observed from InGaN quantum well light emitting diode nanowires.
Microcombs - optical frequency combs generated in microresonators - have advanced tremendously in the last decade, and are advantageous for applications in frequency metrology, navigation, spectroscopy, telecommunications, and microwave photonics. Crucially, microcombs offer the prospect of fully integrated miniaturized optical systems with unprecedented reductions in cost, size, weight, and power. However, this goal has been consistently hindered by the use of bulk free-space and fiber-optic components to process microcombs, limiting form factors to the table-top. Here, we address this challenge by introducing an integrated photonics interposer architecture to process microcombs and replace discrete components. Taking microcomb-based optical frequency synthesis in the telecom C-band around 1550 nm as our target application, we develop an interposer architecture that collects, routes, and interfaces octave-wide optical signals between photonic chiplets and heterogeneously integrated devices that constitute the synthesizer. We have implemented the octave spanning spectral filtering of a microcomb, central to the interposer, in the popular silicon nitride photonic platform, and have confirmed the requisite performance of the individual elements of the interposer. Moreover, we show that the thick silicon nitride needed for bright dissipative Kerr soliton generation can be integrated with the comparatively thin silicon nitride interposer layer through octave-bandwidth adiabatic evanescent coupling, indicating a path towards future system-level consolidation. Our interposer architecture addresses the immediate need for on-chip microcomb processing to successfully miniaturize microcomb systems. As microcombs and integrated devices evolve, our approach can be readily adapted to other metrology-grade applications based on optical atomic clocks and high-precision navigation and spectroscopy.
On-chip microlaser sources in the blue constitute an important building block for complex integrated photonic circuits on silicon. We have developed photonic circuits operating in the blue spectral range based on microdisks and bus waveguides in III-nitride on silicon. We report on the interplay between microdisk-waveguide coupling and its optical properties. We observe critical coupling and phase matching, i.e. the most efficient energy transfer scheme, for very short gap sizes and thin waveguides (g = 45 nm and w = 170 nm) in the spontaneous emission regime. Whispering gallery mode lasing is demonstrated for a wide range of parameters with a strong dependence of the threshold on the loaded quality factor. We show the dependence and high sensitivity of the output signal on the coupling. Lastly, we observe the impact of processing on the tuning of mode resonances due to the very short coupling distances. Such small footprint on-chip integrated microlasers providing maximum energy transfer into a photonic circuit have important potential applications for visible-light communication and lab-on-chip bio-sensors.
Tuning and reconfiguring nanophotonic components is needed to realize systems incorporating many components. The electrostatic force can deform a structure and tune its optical response. Despite the success of electrostatic actuators, they suffer from trade-offs between tuning voltage, tuning range, and on-chip area. Piezoelectric actuation could resolve all these challenges. Standard materials possess piezoelectric coefficients on the order of ${0.01}~text{nm/V}$, suggesting extremely small on-chip actuation using potentials on the order of one volt. Here we propose and demonstrate compact piezoelectric actuators, called nanobenders, that transduce tens of nanometers per volt. By leveraging the non-uniform electric field from submicron electrodes, we generate bending of a piezoelectric nanobeam. Combined with a sliced photonic crystal cavity to sense displacement, we show tuning of an optical resonance by $sim 5~text{nm/V}~({0.6}~text{THz/V})$ and between $1520$ and $1560~text{nm}$ ($sim 400$ linewidths) with only $ {4}~text{V}$. Finally, we consider other tunable nanophotonic components enabled by nanobenders.