High-performance polarization management devices based on thin-film lithium niobate

Abstract

High-speed polarization management is highly desirable for many applications, such as remote sensing, telecommunication, and medical diagnosis. However, most of the approaches for polarization management rely on bulky optical components that are slow to respond, cumbersome to use, and sometimes with high drive voltages. Here, we overcome these limitations by harnessing photonic integrated circuits based on thin-film lithium niobate platform. We successfully realize a portfolio of thin-film lithium niobate devices for essential polarization management functionalities, including arbitrary polarization generation, fast polarization measurement, polarization scrambling, and automatic polarization control. The present devices feature ultra-fast control speeds, low drive voltages, low optical losses and compact footprints. Using these devices, we achieve high fidelity polarization generation with a polarization extinction ratio up to 41.9 dB and fast polarization scrambling with a scrambling rate up to 65 Mrad s−1, both of which are best results in integrated optics. We also demonstrate the endless polarization state tracking operation in our devices. The demonstrated devices unlock a drastically new level of performance and scales in polarization management devices, leading to a paradigm shift in polarization management.

Free-Standing Porous and Nonporous Polyethylene Thin Films Using Spin Coating: An Alternate to the Extrusion–Stretching Process

“…Thin films are widely used for various applications, including micro-electromechanical systems, sensors, desalination, filtration, air filters, and integrated circuits . They can be coated on substrates or used as free-standing materials depending on the application.…”

High‐Performance Mode‐Multiplexing Device with Anisotropic Lithium‐Niobate‐on‐Insulator Waveguides

“…[12][13][14][15] Meanwhile, it is still desired to develop more diversity of high-performance LNOI photonic devices to satisfy the demands in various applications, similar to the development of silicon photonics. [16][17][18] Note that multimode photonics is enormously attractive because the introduction of higher-order modes greatly enhances the link capacity with the mode-division multiplexing (MDM) technology [19,20] as well as improves the design flexibility of on-chip photonic devices. [21] Currently multimode photonics has been investigated extensively on silicon, and various multimode silicon photonic devices have been developed successfully, including mode (de)multiplexers, [22,23] multimode waveguide bends (MWBs), [24][25][26][27][28] and multimode waveguide crossings, [29,30] etc.…”

Experimental investigation on the unbalanced Mach–Zehnder interferometer on lithium niobate thin film

“…Other than exceptional optical properties of LN, LNTF provides the capability for dense integration of photonic integrated circuits (PICs) on the novel platform while being compatible with conventional CMOS technology, resulting in various compact and superior devices that are inaccessible to their conventional counterparts. With the advancement in micro-and nanofabrication technology, a variety of highperformance devices on LNTF, based on nanowaveguides, microresonators, and photonic crystal structures, have been reported for applications in modulators [7][8][9][10][11] , filters [12,13] , polarization controllers [14] , frequency convertors [15][16][17][18] , quantum sources [19][20][21] , and so forth.…”

“…As one critical component among integration applications, the Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI), which can be balanced or unbalanced, has a wide range of applications. Amplitude modulators based on the balanced MZI structure are ubiquitous and play a significant role in optical switching, processing, and communication [1][2][3][4]7,8,14] . Unbalanced MZIs (UMZIs), on the other hand, can be used to implement wavelength sensitive devices, such as comb filters or interleavers [22] , which have been demonstrated as the key component of sensors, filters, spectrometers in photonics, and neural and network applications [23,24] .…”