No Arabic abstract
Laser based ranging (LiDAR) - already ubiquitously used in robotics, industrial monitoring, or geodesy - is a key sensor technology for future autonomous driving, and has been employed in nearly all successful implementations of autonomous vehicles to date. Coherent laser allows long-range detection, operates eye safe, is immune to crosstalk and yields simultaneous velocity and distance information. Yet for actual deployment in vehicles, video frame-rate requirements for object detection, classification and sensor fusion mandate megapixel per second measurement speed. Such pixel rates are not possible to attain with current coherent single laser-detector architectures at high definition range imagining, and make parallelization essential. A megapixel class coherent LiDAR has not been demonstrated, and is still impeded by the arduous requirements of large banks of detectors and digitizers on the receiver side, that need to be integrated on chip. Here we report hardware efficient coherent laser ranging at megapixel per second imaging rates. This is achieved using a novel concept for massively parallel coherent laser ranging that requires only a single laser and a single photoreceiver, yet achieves simultaneous recording of more than 64 channels with distance and velocity measurements each - attaining an unprecedented 5 megapixel per second rate. Heterodyning two offset chirped soliton microcombs on a single coherent receiver yields an interferogram containing both distance and velocity information of all particular channels, thereby alleviating the need to individually separate, detect and digitize distinct channels. The reported LiDAR implementation is hardware-efficient, compatible with photonic integration and demonstrates the significant advantages of acquisition speed, complexity and cost benefits afforded by the convergence of optical telecommunication and metrology technologies.
Kerr soliton microcombs have recently emerged as a prominent topic in integrated photonics and enabled new horizons for optical frequency metrology. Kerr soliton microcombs, as its name suggests, are based on the high-order cubic optical nonlinearity. It is desirable to exploit quadratic photonic materials, namely Pockels materials, for soliton generation and on-chip implementation of 1f-2f comb self-referencing. Such quadratically-driven solitons have been theoretically proposed, but have not yet been observed in a nanophotonic platform despite of recent progresses in quadratic comb generation in free-space and crystalline resonators. Here we report photonic chip-based Pockels microcomb solitons driven by three-wave mixing in an aluminum nitride microring resonator. In contrast to typical Kerr solitons, our Pockels soliton features unity soliton generation fidelity, two-by-two annihilation of multi-soliton states, favorable tuning dynamics, and high pump-to-soliton conversion efficiency.
The Terahertz or millimeter wave frequency band (300 GHz - 3 THz) is spectrally located between microwaves and infrared light and has attracted significant interest for applications in broadband wireless communications, space-borne radiometers for Earth remote sensing, astrophysics, and imaging. In particular optically generated THz waves are of high interest for low-noise signal generation. In particular optically generated THz waves are of high interest for low-noise signal generation. Here, we propose and demonstrate stabilized terahertz wave generation using a microresonator-based frequency comb (microcomb). A unitravelling-carrier photodiode (UTC-PD) converts low-noise optical soliton pulses from the microcomb to a terahertz wave at the solitons repetition rate (331 GHz). With a free-running microcomb, the Allan deviation of the Terahertz signal is 4.5*10^-9 at 1 s measurement time with a phase noise of -72 dBc/Hz (-118 dBc/Hz) at 10 kHz (10 MHz) offset frequency. By locking the repetition rate to an in-house hydrogen maser, in-loop fractional frequency stabilities of 9.6*10^-15 and 1.9*10^-17 are obtained at averaging times of 1 s and 2000 s respectively, limited by the maser reference signal. Moreover, the terahertz signal is successfully used to perform a proof-of-principle demonstration of terahertz imaging of peanuts. Combining the monolithically integrated UTC-PD with an on-chip microcomb, the demonstrated technique could provide a route towards highly stable continuous terahertz wave generation in chip-scale packages for out-of-the-lab applications. In particular, such systems would be useful as compact tools for high-capacity wireless communication, spectroscopy, imaging, remote sensing, and astrophysical applications.
Implementing variational quantum algorithms with noisy intermediate-scale quantum machines of up to a hundred qubits is nowadays considered as one of the most promising routes towards achieving a quantum practical advantage. In multiqubit circuits, running advanced quantum algorithms is hampered by the noise inherent to quantum gates which distances us from the idea of universal quantum computing. Based on a one-dimensional quantum spin chain with competing symmetric and asymmetric pairwise exchange interactions, herein we discuss the capabilities of quantum algorithms with special attention paid to a hardware-efficient variational eigensolver. A delicate interplay between magnetic interactions allows one to stabilize a chiral state that destroys the homogeneity of magnetic ordering, thus making this solution highly entangled. Quantifying entanglement in terms of quantum concurrence, we argue that, while being capable of correctly reproducing a uniform magnetic configuration, the hardware-efficient ansatz meets difficulties in providing a detailed description to a noncollinear magnetic structure. The latter naturally limits the application range of variational quantum computing to solve quantum simulation tasks.
Wavefront sensing and reconstruction are widely used for adaptive optics, aberration correction, and high-resolution optical phase imaging. Traditionally, interference and/or microlens arrays are used to convert the optical phase into intensity variation. Direct imaging of distorted wavefront usually results in complicated phase retrieval with low contrast and low sensitivity. Here, a novel approach has been developed and experimentally demonstrated based on the phase-sensitive information encoded into second harmonic signals, which are intrinsically sensitive to wavefront modulations. By designing and implementing a deep neural network, we demonstrate the second harmonic imaging enhanced by deep learning decipher (SHIELD) for efficient and resilient phase retrieval. Inheriting the advantages of two-photon microscopy, SHIELD demonstrates single-shot, reference-free, and video-rate phase imaging with sensitivity better than {lambda}/100 and high robustness against noises, facilitating numerous applications from biological imaging to wavefront sensing.
Microcomb generation with simultaneous $chi^{(2)}$ and $chi^{(3)}$ nonlinearities brings new possibilities for ultra-broadband and potentially self-referenced integrated comb sources. However, the evolution of the intracavity field involving multiple nonlinear processes shows complex dynamics that is still poorly understood. Here we report on strong soliton regulation induced by fundamental-second-harmonic (FD-SH) mode coupling. The formation of solitons from chaos is extensively investigated based on coupled Lugiato-Lefever equations. The soliton generation shows more deterministic behaviors in the presence of FD-SH mode interaction, in sharp contrast to the usual cases where the soliton number and relative locations are stochastic. Deterministic single soliton transition, soliton binding and prohibition are observed, depending on the phase matching condition and coupling coefficient between the fundamental and second-harmonic waves. Our finding provides important new insights into the soliton dynamics in microcavities with simultaneous $chi^{(2)}$ and $chi^{(3)}$ nonlinearities, and can be immediate guidance for broadband soliton comb generation with such platforms.