ترغب بنشر مسار تعليمي؟ اضغط هنا

Overcoming Thermo-Optical Dynamics in Broadband Nanophotonic Sensing

83   0   0.0 ( 0 )
 نشر من قبل Mingkang Wang
 تاريخ النشر 2021
  مجال البحث فيزياء
والبحث باللغة English




اسأل ChatGPT حول البحث

Advances in integrated photonics open exciting opportunities for batch-fabricated optical sensors using high quality factor nanophotonic cavities to achieve ultra-high sensitivities and bandwidths. The sensitivity improves with higher optical power, however, localized absorption and heating within a micrometer-scale mode volume prominently distorts the cavity resonances and strongly couples the sensor response to thermal dynamics, limiting the sensitivity and hindering the measurement of broadband time-dependent signals. Here, we derive a frequency-dependent photonic sensor transfer function that accounts for thermo-optical dynamics and quantitatively describes the measured broadband optomechanical signal from an integrated photonic atomic-force-microscopy nanomechanical probe. Using this transfer function, the probe can be operated in the high optical power, strongly thermo-optically nonlinear regime, reaching a sensitivity of $approx$ 0.4 fm/Hz$^{1/2}$, an improvement of $approx 10times$ relative to the best performance in the linear regime. Counterintuitively, we discover that higher transduction gain and sensitivity are obtained with lower quality factor optical modes for low signal frequencies. Not limited to optomechanical transducers, the derived transfer function is generally valid for describing small-signal dynamic response of a broad range of technologically important photonic sensors subject to the thermo-optical effect.



قيم البحث

اقرأ أيضاً

Nanophotonic entangled-photon sources are a critical building block of chip-scale quantum photonic architecture and have seen significant development over the past two decades. These sources generate photon pairs that typically span over a narrow fre quency bandwidth. Generating entanglement over a wide spectral region has proven to be useful in a wide variety of applications including quantum metrology, spectroscopy and sensing, and optical communication. However, generation of broadband photon pairs with temporal coherence approaching an optical cycle on a chip is yet to be seen. Here we demonstrate generation of ultra-broadband entangled photons using spontaneous parametric down-conversion in a periodically-poled lithium niobate nanophotonic waveguide. We employ dispersion engineering to achieve a bandwidth of 100 THz (1.2 - 2 $mu$m), at a high efficiency of 13 GHz/mW. The photons show strong temporal correlations and purity with the coincidence-to-accidental ratio exceeding $10^5$ and $>$ 98% two-photon interference visibility. These properties together with the piezo-electric and electro-optic control and reconfigurability, make thin-film lithium niobate an excellent platform for a controllable entanglement source for quantum communication and computing, and open a path towards femtosecond metrology and spectroscopy with non-classical light on a nanophotonic chip.
Optical limiters are nonlinear devices that feature decreasing transmittance with increasing incident optical intensity, and thus can protect sensitive components from high-intensity illumination. The ideal optical limiter reflects rather than absorb s light in its active (limiting) state, minimizing risk of damage to the limiter itself. Previous efforts to realize reflective limiters were based on embedding nonlinear layers into relatively thick multilayer photonic structures, resulting in substantial fabrication complexity, reduced speed and, in some instances, limited working bandwidth. We overcome these tradeoffs by using the insulator-to-metal transition in vanadium dioxide (VO2) to achieve intensity-dependent modulation of resonant transmission through aperture antennas. Due to the dramatic change of optical properties across the insulator-to-metal transition, low-quality-factor resonators were sufficient to achieve high on-off ratios in device transmittance. As a result, our ultra-thin reflective limiter (thickness ~1/100 of the free-space wavelength) is broadband in terms of operating wavelength (> 2 um at 10 um) and angle of incidence (up to ~50$deg$ away from the normal).
Low-loss nanophotonic resonators have been widely used in fundamental science and applications thanks to their ability to concentrate optical energy. Key for resonator engineering, the total intrinsic loss is easily determined by spectroscopy, howeve r, quantitatively separating absorption and radiative losses is challenging. While the concentrated heat generated by absorption within the small mode volume results in generally unwanted thermo-optical effects, they can provide a way for quantifying absorption. Here, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a technique for separating the loss mechanisms with high confidence using only linear spectroscopic measurements. We use the optically measured resonator thermal time constant to experimentally connect the easily-calculable heat capacity to the thermal impedance, needed to calculate the absorbed power from the temperature change. We report the absorption, radiation, and coupling losses for ten whispering-gallery modes of three different radial orders on a Si microdisk. Similar absorptive loss rates are found for all the modes, despite order-of-magnitude differences in the total dissipation rate due to widely differing radiation losses. Measuring radiation losses of many modes enables distinguishing the two major components of radiation loss originating from scattering and leakage. The all-optical characterization technique is applicable to any nanophotonic resonators subject to thermo-optical effects.
Microwave photonic technologies, which upshift the carrier into the optical domain to facilitate the generation and processing of ultrawide-band electronic signals at vastly reduced fractional bandwidths, have the potential to achieve superior perfor mance compared to conventional electronics for targeted functions. For microwave photonic applications such as filters, coherent radars, subnoise detection, optical communications and low-noise microwave generation, frequency combs are key building blocks. By virtue of soliton microcombs, frequency combs can now be built using CMOS compatible photonic integrated circuits, operated with low power and noise, and have already been employed in system-level demonstrations. Yet, currently developed photonic integrated microcombs all operate with repetition rates significantly beyond those that conventional electronics can detect and process, compounding their use in microwave photonics. Here we demonstrate integrated soliton microcombs operating in two widely employed microwave bands, X- and K-band. These devices can produce more than 300 comb lines within the 3-dB-bandwidth, and generate microwave signals featuring phase noise levels below 105 dBc/Hz (140 dBc/Hz) at 10 kHz (1 MHz) offset frequency, comparable to modern electronic microwave synthesizers. In addition, the soliton pulse stream can be injection-locked to a microwave signal, enabling actuator-free repetition rate stabilization, tuning and microwave spectral purification, at power levels compatible with silicon-based lasers (<150 mW). Our results establish photonic integrated soliton microcombs as viable integrated low-noise microwave synthesizers. Further, the low repetition rates are critical for future dense WDM channel generation schemes, and can significantly reduce the system complexity of photonic integrated frequency synthesizers and atomic clocks.
Nonlinear frequency conversion plays a crucial role in advancing the functionality of next-generation optical systems. Portable metrology references and quantum networks will demand highly efficient second-order nonlinear devices, and the intense non linear interactions of nanophotonic waveguides can be leveraged to meet these requirements. Here we demonstrate second harmonic generation (SHG) in GaAs-on-insulator waveguides with unprecedented efficiency of 40 W$^{-1}$ for a single-pass device. This result is achieved by minimizing the propagation loss and optimizing phase-matching. We investigate surface-state absorption and design the waveguide geometry for modal phase-matching with tolerance to fabrication variation. A 2.0 $mu$m pump is converted to a 1.0 $mu$m signal in a length of 2.9 mm with a wide signal bandwidth of 148 GHz. Tunable and efficient operation is demonstrated over a temperature range of 45 $^{circ}$C with a slope of 0.24 nm/$^{circ}$C. Wafer-bonding between GaAs and SiO$_2$ is optimized to minimize waveguide loss, and the devices are fabricated on 76 mm wafers with high uniformity. We expect this device to enable fully integrated self-referenced frequency combs and high-rate entangled photon pair generation.
التعليقات
جاري جلب التعليقات جاري جلب التعليقات
سجل دخول لتتمكن من متابعة معايير البحث التي قمت باختيارها
mircosoft-partner

هل ترغب بارسال اشعارات عن اخر التحديثات في شمرا-اكاديميا