No Arabic abstract
Superconducting cavity electro-optics (EO) presents a promising route to coherently convert microwave and optical photons and distribute quantum entanglement between superconducting circuits over long-distance through an optical network. High EO conversion efficiency demands transduction materials with strong Pockels effect and excellent optical transparency. Thin-film Lithium Niobate (TFLN) offers these desired characteristics however so far has only delivered unidirectional conversion with efficiencies on the order of $10^{-5}$, largely impacted by its prominent photorefractive (PR) effect at cryogenic temperatures. Here we show that, by mitigating the PR effect and associated charge-screening effect, the devices conversion efficiency can be enhanced by orders of magnitude while maintaining stable cryogenic operation, thus allowing a demonstration of conversion bidirectionality and accurate quantification of on-chip efficiency. With the optimized monolithic integrated superconducting EO device based on TFLN-on-sapphire substrate, an on-chip conversion efficiency of 1.02% (internal efficiency, 15.2%) is realized. Our demonstration indicates that with further device improvement, it is feasible for TFLN to approach unitary internal conversion efficiency.
Many technologies in quantum photonics require cryogenic conditions to operate. However, the underlying platform behind active components such as switches, modulators and phase shifters must be compatible with these operating conditions. To address this, we demonstrate an electro-optic polarisation converter for 1550nm light at 0.8K in titanium in-diffused lithium niobate waveguides. To do so, we exploit the electro-optic properties of lithium niobate to convert between orthogonal polarisation modes with a fiber-to-fiber transmission >43%. We achieve a modulation depth of 23.6 +/-3.3dB and a conversion voltage-length product of 28.8 V cm. This enables the combination of cryogenic photonics and active components on a single integration platform.
Many applications of metasurfaces require an ability to dynamically change their properties in time domain. Electrical tuning techniques are of particular interest, since they pave a way to on-chip integration of metasurfaces with optoelectronic devices. In this work, we propose and experimentally demonstrate an electro-optic lithium niobate (EO-LN) metasurface that shows dynamic modulations to phase retardation of transmitted light. Quasi-bound states in the continuum (QBIC) are observed from our metasurface. And by applying external electric voltages, the refractive index of the LN is changed by Pockels EO nonlinearity, leading to efficient phase modulations to the transmitted light around the QBIC wavelength. Our EO-LN metasurface opens up new routes for potential applications in the field of displaying, pulse shaping, and spatial light modulating.
Lithium niobate (LN), an outstanding and versatile material, has influenced our daily life for decades: from enabling high-speed optical communications that form the backbone of the Internet to realizing radio-frequency filtering used in our cell phones. This half-century-old material is currently embracing a revolution in thin-film LN integrated photonics. The success of manufacturing wafer-scale, high-quality, thin films of LN on insulator (LNOI), accompanied with breakthroughs in nanofabrication techniques, have made high-performance integrated nanophotonic components possible. With rapid development in the past few years, some of these thin-film LN devices, such as optical modulators and nonlinear wavelength converters, have already outperformed their legacy counterparts realized in bulk LN crystals. Furthermore, the nanophotonic integration enabled ultra-low-loss resonators in LN, which unlocked many novel applications such as optical frequency combs and quantum transducers. In this Review, we cover -- from basic principles to the state of the art -- the diverse aspects of integrated thin-film LN photonics, including the materials, basic passive components, and various active devices based on electro-optics, all-optical nonlinearities, and acousto-optics. We also identify challenges that this platform is currently facing and point out future opportunities. The field of integrated LNOI photonics is advancing rapidly and poised to make critical impacts on a broad range of applications in communication, signal processing, and quantum information.
Modern communication networks require high performance and scalable electro-optic modulators that convert electrical signals to optical signals at high speed. Existing lithium niobate modulators have excellent performance but are bulky and prohibitively expensive to scale up. Here we demonstrate scalable and high-performance nanophotonic electro-optic modulators made of single-crystalline lithium niobate microring resonators and micro-Mach-Zehnder interferometers. We show a half-wave electro-optic modulation efficiency of 1.8V$cdot$cm and data rates up to 40 Gbps.
Materials with strong $chi^{(2)}$ optical nonlinearity, especially lithium niobate, play a critical role in building optical parametric oscillators (OPOs). However, chip-scale integration of low-loss $chi^{(2)}$ materials remains challenging and limits the threshold power of on-chip $chi^{(2)}$ OPO. Here we report the first on-chip lithium niobate optical parametric oscillator at the telecom wavelengths using a quasi-phase matched, high-quality microring resonator, whose threshold power ($sim$30 $mu$W) is 400 times lower than that in previous $chi^{(2)}$ integrated photonics platforms. An on-chip power conversion efficiency of 11% is obtained at a pump power of 93 $mu$W. The OPO wavelength tuning is achieved by varying the pump frequency and chip temperature. With the lowest power threshold among all on-chip OPOs demonstrated so far, as well as advantages including high conversion efficiency, flexibility in quasi-phase matching and device scalability, the thin-film lithium niobate OPO opens new opportunities for chip-based tunable classical and quantum light sources and provides an potential platform for realizing photonic neural networks.