Thin-film lithium niobate has emerged as an excellent, multifaceted platform for integrated photonics and opto-electronics, in both classical and quantum domains. We introduce a novel, to the best of our knowledge, dual-capacitor electrode layout for an efficient interface between electrical and optical signals on this platform. It significantly enhances the electro-optical modulation efficiency to an exceptional voltage–length product of 0.64 V ⋅ c m , thereby lowering the required electric power by many times. This technique can boost the performance of growing applications at the interface of integrated electronics and optics, such as microwave photonics, frequency comb generation, and telecommunication transmission.

No abstract

We propose and experimentally demonstrate an optical reservoir computing system in free space, using second-harmonic generation for nonlinear kernel functions and a scattering medium to enhance reservoir nodes interconnection. We test it for one-step and multi-step predication of Mackey–Glass time series with different input-mapping methods on a spatial light modulator. For one-step prediction, we achieve 1.8 × 10−3 normalized mean squared error (NMSE). For the multi-step prediction, we explore two different mapping methods: linear-combination and concatenation, achieving 16-step prediction with NMSE as low as 3.5 × 10−4. Robust and superior for multi-step prediction, our approach and design have potential for parallel data processing tasks such as video prediction, speech translation, and so on.