Self-pulsing and chaos in short chains of coupled nonlinear microcavities

Abstract

Silicon waveguides are promising χ 3 -based photon pair sources. Demonstrations so far have been based on picosecond pulsed lasers. Here, we present the first investigation of photon pair generation in silicon waveguides in a continuous regime. The source is characterized by coincidence measurements. We uncover the presence of unexpected noise which had not been noticed in earlier experiments. Subsequently, we present advances towards integration of the photon pair source with other components on the chip. This is demonstrated by photon pair generation in a Sagnac loop interferometer and inside a micro-ring cavity. Comparison with the straight waveguide shows that these are promising avenues for improving the source. In particular photon pair generation in the micro-ring cavity yields a source with a spectral width of approximately 150 pm resulting in a spectral brightness increased by more than 2 orders of magnitude.

Time-domain and frequency-domain modeling of nonlinear optical components at the circuit-level using a node-based approach

“…In [15] we also showed that the waveforms from the simulation are almost identical to the waveforms from a full-wave FDTD simulation modeling the same system. The difference in simulation time motivates the use of this simulator: It takes 10 hours to simulate this oscillation in 2D FDTD, versus a few milliseconds with CMT, with only a slight sacrifice in accuracy.…”

“…We assume no input from the right, s 2;1,+ = 0. This system will exhibit self-pulsation under certain assumptions, as studied in [15].…”

Stable integrated hyper-parametric oscillator based on coupled optical microcavities

“…They are also stable, in the sense that in the whole SP region of Fig. 2 the cycles never undergo a period-doubling cascade, as it occurs in [13,15].…”

“…lateral) mode. In the nonlinear case (χ = 1), if γ ≈ 1 is considered, like in [15][16][17], we obtain a complicated bifurcation diagram and different regimes of self-pulsing, which may be subject to period-doubling bifurcation. This is due to fact that the resonances of the coupled system are too close, they are thus all significantly excited by the external source and this causes an intrinsic instability of the beating among them.…”

“…Alternatively a system of coupled cavities can be designed. This last solution is normally limited to two cavities and the system is destabilized and starts to oscillate at a frequency which is a sort of beating between the resonances of the overall system [15][16][17]. The main disadvantage is that the pulsation period is of the same order of the cavity lifetime, so that to obtain oscillations in the GHz range (i.e.…”