Nanophotonic waveguide chip-to-world beam scanning.

Area of Science:

• Photonics and Integrated Optics
• Nanotechnology
• Quantum Information Science

Background:

• Current beam-scanning technologies face a trade-off between scalability and beam quality.
• Diffractive optics on photonic integrated circuits offer scalability but suffer from poor mode quality.
• Micromechanical scanners provide high-quality beams but lack scalable integration.

Purpose of the Study:

• To overcome limitations in current beam-scanning technologies.
• To develop a scalable, high-performance photonic interface for chip-to-world applications.
• To enable advancements in optical ranging, display, communication, computation, and quantum information science.

Main Methods:

• Development of a photonic ski-jump: a nanoscale waveguide integrated on a piezoelectric cantilever.
• Fabrication using a volume complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) foundry.
• Demonstration of out-of-plane curling, emission of a diffraction-limited beam, and high-Q mechanical resonances.

Main Results:

• The photonic ski-jump achieves scalable two-dimensional beam scanning in a sub-0.1 mm² footprint.
• Demonstrated a footprint-adjusted spot rate of 68.6 M spots/s/mm², exceeding MEMS mirrors by over 50x.
• Enabled full-color image/video projection and single-photon initialization/readout.
• Uniformity across a 64 ski-jump array shows potential for gigaspot resolution at kilohertz rates.

Conclusions:

• The photonic ski-jump offers a scalable solution for 2D beam scanning, overcoming existing trade-offs.
• This technology enables a seamless optical pipeline between integrated photonic processors and the free-space world.
• Paves the way for high-resolution, high-speed optical systems in diverse scientific and technological fields.