High-performance Kerr microresonator optical parametric oscillator on a silicon chip

Abstract

Optical parametric oscillation (OPO) is distinguished by its wavelength access, that is, the ability to flexibly generate coherent light at wavelengths that are dramatically different from the pump laser, and in principle bounded solely by energy conservation between the input pump field and the output signal/idler fields. As society adopts advanced tools in quantum information science, metrology, and sensing, microchip OPO may provide an important path for accessing relevant wavelengths. However, a practical source of coherent light should additionally have high conversion efficiency and high output power. Here, we demonstrate a silicon photonics OPO device with unprecedented performance. Our OPO device, based on the third-order (χ(3)) nonlinearity in a silicon nitride microresonator, produces output signal and idler fields widely separated from each other in frequency ( > 150 THz), and exhibits a pump-to-idler conversion efficiency up to 29 % with a corresponding output idler power of > 18 mW on-chip. This performance is achieved by suppressing competitive processes and by strongly overcoupling the output light. This methodology can be readily applied to existing silicon photonics platforms with heterogeneously-integrated pump lasers, enabling flexible coherent light generation across a broad range of wavelengths with high output power and efficiency.

Ultra-efficient generation of time-energy entangled photon pairs in an InGaP photonic crystal cavity

“…optical states. This has many benefits, for instance, more efficient power conversion in OPOs 36 , which is more difficult to achieve in ring resonators and requires nontrivial engineering [44][45][46] . The suppression of unwanted interactions is also critical for the generation of squeezed light 47 .…”

Foundry manufacturing of tight-confinement, dispersion-engineered, ultralow-loss silicon nitride photonic integrated circuit

“…As can be seen, our microresonators coupled with curved bus waveguides can already provide near-unity I and strong over-coupling (e.g. 𝐾 > 7 for the TM 00 ), which are critical for microring-based phase modulation [60,61], wideband tunable delay line [62], and the extraction of quantum light states generated in high-𝑄 microresonators [27,[63][64][65].…”

UV, visible, and near-infrared light generation through cascaded nonlinear processes in silicon-nitride microring resonators pumped at telecom wavelength

“…In particular, excellent results have already been demonstrated by exploiting the on-chip integration and confinement of OPO processes on microresonators that feature increased light-matter interaction. [1][2][3][4][5][6] While χ (2) OPOs face the inconvenience of requiring pumping by a blue or UV laser to generate visible light and, therefore, the impossibility of integration, impressive results have already been demonstrated using χ (3) OPO. Conservation of momentum and energy in this nonlinear process are easier to satisfy when the signal and idler are close to the pump.…”

“…In these works, tuning of the signal and idler can be enabled by changing the wavelength of the pump or adjusting the cross-section of the device, thus affecting the mode dispersion. A comparable strategy, involving a hybrid-mode-family OPO, 5,6 mitigates the challenge of phase matching by using distinct transverse mode families for the pump, signal, and…”