Bright and dark Talbot pulse trains on a chip

Area of Science:

• Photonics
• Optical Engineering
• Quantum Optics

Background:

• The temporal Talbot effect enables self-imaging of optical pulse trains, traditionally studied with macroscopic setups.
• Integrating the Talbot effect onto photonic chips for pulse train manipulation remains largely unexplored.
• Existing methods for altering pulse repetition rates often involve bulky instrumentation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To design and experimentally validate an integrated photonic chip for temporal Talbot effect applications.
• To demonstrate on-chip generation of self-images for optical pulse trains.
• To achieve electrical tunability for switching between different output modes.

Main Methods:

• Fabrication of a silicon nitride photonic integrated circuit.
• Imprinting Talbot phase relations onto in-phase optical frequency combs.
• Experimental demonstration of two-fold self-imaging for bright and dark pulse trains.
• Characterization of spectral properties and repetition rate multiplication.

Main Results:

• Successful demonstration of a proof-of-principle integrated device.
• Achieved GHz-repetition-rate doubling of bright and dark pulse trains without spectral modification.
• Demonstrated electrical tunability for switching between pass-through and repetition-rate-multiplication functionalities.
• Confirmed compatibility with other frequencies.

Conclusions:

• The developed integrated photonic chip effectively utilizes the temporal Talbot effect for on-chip pulse repetition rate multiplication.
• This work lays the foundation for system-on-chip integration of Talbot-based pulse multipliers.
• Enables flexible, on-chip up-scaling of optical pulse train repetition rates while preserving spectral characteristics.