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Towards integrated photonic interposers for processing octave-spanning microresonator frequency combs.
Ashutosh Rao1,2, Gregory Moille3,4, Xiyuan Lu3,5
1Physical Measurement Laboratory, Microsystems and Nanotechnology Division, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD, 20899, USA. ashutosh.rao@nist.gov.
Light, Science & Applications
|May 27, 2021
Summary
Researchers developed an integrated photonics interposer architecture to miniaturize microcomb systems. This innovation enables on-chip processing of optical frequency combs, paving the way for compact metrology and navigation devices.
Area of Science:
- Integrated Photonics
- Micro-optics
- Optical Frequency Combs
Background:
- Microcombs, or optical frequency combs generated in microresonators, offer significant advantages for applications like frequency metrology, navigation, and spectroscopy.
- Current microcomb systems are limited to table-top form factors due to the reliance on bulky free-space and fiber-optic components for signal processing.
- There is a critical need for miniaturized, integrated solutions to enable widespread adoption of microcomb technology.
Purpose of the Study:
- To propose and experimentally validate an integrated photonics interposer architecture for on-chip processing of microcomb-based optical signals.
- To address the challenge of miniaturizing microcomb systems by replacing discrete components with an integrated solution.
- To demonstrate the feasibility of integrating octave-wide microcomb signal processing for applications such as optical frequency synthesis.
Main Methods:
- Designed and implemented an integrated photonics interposer architecture for collecting, routing, and interfacing octave-wide microcomb signals.
- Experimentally characterized passive photonic elements including dichroics, multimode interferometers, and tunable ring filters.
- Utilized silicon nitride photonics for octave-spanning spectral filtering and demonstrated integration of thick and thin silicon nitride layers via adiabatic evanescent coupling.
Main Results:
- Confirmed the performance of individual passive elements within the interposer architecture.
- Successfully implemented octave-spanning spectral filtering of a microcomb using silicon nitride photonics.
- Demonstrated a viable method for integrating dissimilar silicon nitride layers, crucial for soliton generation and interposer functionality.
- Numerically confirmed the system-level feasibility of the proposed interposer synthesizer.
Conclusions:
- The proposed interposer architecture effectively addresses the need for on-chip microcomb processing, enabling significant miniaturization of microcomb systems.
- This integrated approach paves the way for compact, cost-effective, and power-efficient optical systems.
- The architecture is adaptable for various metrology-grade applications, including optical atomic clocks, high-precision navigation, and spectroscopy.
