For Very Long Baseline Interferometry high-resolution imaging of exoplanets, an astrophotonic-based aperture synthesis concept is proposed for high-resolution direct imaging of exoplanets. A silicon photonic chip incorporates microheaters and optical phase shifters for precise control of delays and phase synchronization from widely separated receivers. A satellite laser guide star with a modulated optical signal serves as a global phase reference, enabling high-speed, high-stroke phase compensation and combining. The chip's design addresses challenges such as atmospheric turbulence and phase stability in optical frequencies. The study outlines the current proof-of-concept instrument status, measured performance, chip fabrication, and routes towards photonics-enabled exoplanet imaging.
Integrated photonics can be used for stable, cost-effective and precision instruments in astronomy. We present our development and testing of a silicon ring resonator as a tunable correlation filter, facilitating real-time gas contrast for specific molecules with low cross-sensitivity. Ring resonators for various gases in H-band, polarization-selective filters, and fiber-coupled prototypes are described. We present the first on-sky demonstration of silicon-on-insulator astrophotonics, and telluric CO2 absorption feature detection as a proof-of-concept using the 1.2m DAO telescope and REVOLT adaptive optics instrument. Comparisons with traditional spectrographs inform discussions on improving performance and extensions towards an observatory-class instrument for exoplanet biosignature detection.
Over the past 15 years since their first demonstration, subwavelength grating metamaterials in silicon photonic devices have become widely used and attracted rapidly growing research interest while also breaking into commercial applications. We will discuss recent advances in this research field, with a focus on novel components and circuits for beam steering applications, on-chip filtering and quantum optics. On-chip optical waveguides comprised of Mie resonant particle chains have only recently been demonstrated and promise to be the foundation of a new and exciting branch of integrated metamaterials research. We will review the early work in this area.
Integrated optical filters play a key role in modern optical systems, finding extensive applications in quantum optics, biosensing, programmable photonics, and telecommunications. Among the most commonly used structures utilized for implementing integrated optical filters are ring resonators and Bragg gratings. Bragg gratings are characterized by a periodically perturbed refractive index profile along the propagation direction. By precisely engineering the strength of the perturbation along the grating length, filters with arbitrary spectral responses can be achieved.
In this work we summarize our recent contributions to integrated Bragg filters in Si-photonics, covering designs for applications ranging from telecommunications to quantum optics.
Silicon nitride (Si3N4) is a leading platform in integrated photonics, providing unique passive functionalities, while maintaining compatibility with complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor processes and scalable and low-cost high-volume production. However, the moderate index contrast of the Si3N4 platform makes it difficult to implement efficient vertical surface grating couplers. In this work, we present efficient and robust fiber-chip grating couplers on native and hybrid Si3N4 platforms. Minimum coupling losses between -5 dB and -3 dB were measured for single-etch fabricated devices near 1.55 μm wavelength. Moreover, by leveraging the amorphous-silicon overlay on top of the Si3N4 platform, we develop hybrid single-etch grating couplers, with a coupling loss approaching 1 dB. The demonstrated grating couplers are promising for SiN integrated photonics, enabling a rapid and cost-effective chip interfacing with standard optical fibers. This opens up novel opportunities for rising applications, including optical communications, nonlinear optics, or quantum information sciences.
The design of a high-efficiency grating coupler for silicon nitride (SiN) photonic integrated circuits is presented. Our devices use a high-index amorphous silicon (α-Si) overlay and subwavelength metamaterial apodization to achieve superior coupling efficiency compared to SiN-only gratings. The high index contrast of the α-Si layer results in increased grating strength, making it possible to radiate more power off-chip within the mode field diameter (MFD) of a standard single mode optical fiber. Simultaneously, through the use of subwavelength grating (SWG) apodization, we shape the radiated field to optimize the overlap with the Gaussian-like profile of the fiber mode at an operating wavelength of 1.31 μm. The overlap is further improved by considering a focalizing scheme, wherein the grating is designed to couple to a fiber placed a certain distance away from the chip. In this configuration, the constraint imposed on the length of the grating by the MFD of the fiber mode is relaxed, allowing for a longer structure that will diffract more power off-chip. By combining the use of an α-Si overlay with SWG apodization and beam focalization, we achieve a coupling efficiency of - 1.3 dB.
Silicon Nitride photonic integrated circuits are highly sought after for quantum applications. This platform offers ultra-low propagation losses, reduced birefringence, and a wide transparency window. This study presents the design and experimental demonstration of a compact silicon nitride polarization beam splitter (PBS) for the 950 nm wavelength range. The PBS employs cascaded tapered asymmetric directional couplers to achieve efficient polarization control. With insertion losses below 1 dB, polarization extinction ratios exceeding 19 dB (TE) and 10 dB (TM), and operation from 920 nm to 970 nm, it offers promising integration into photonic systems requiring precise polarization manipulation.
Silicon photonics has established itself as a key integration platform, leveraging high-quality materials and large-scale manufacturing using mastered toolsets of complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) foundries. Chip-scale photonics offer unique promises for dense integration of versatile optical functions through compact and high-performance building blocks. Integrated photonics is now competing technology for many applications, spanning from telecom/datacom and interconnects up to quantum sciences and light detection and ranging (LIDAR) systems, among others. However, the lack of low-loss input/output chip interfaces can be prohibitive to successfully deploy multi-diverse device applications. Low coupling loss is essential in reducing overall power budget in photonic systems, impacting on-chip integration level. The light coupling from an off-chip environment into the planar waveguide platforms has always been a challenging research problem since the early years of integrated photonics. Optical interfaces formed on a photonic chip surface, rather than implemented on a chip edge, have been widely used to access photonic circuits with optical fibers or enabling free-space coupling of light beams. Surface gratings can be positioned at arbitrary locations and/or arranged in pre-defined patterns on the chip, facilitating wafer-scale testing and optical packaging. In this work, we present our recent progress in the development of silicon-based surface gratings for use in fiber-to-chip and free-space beam coupling. In particular, we discuss prospective design approaches to develop low-loss surface grating couplers implemented on silicon-on-insulator (SOI), silicon nitride (SiN), and hybrid silicon-silicon nitride (Si-SiN) platforms, allowing to approach a coupling loss below -1 dB. Among these, we also cover contemporary advances in compact silicon metamaterial nano-antennas for dense optical phased arrays, obtaining high a diffraction performance (> 90%) and wideband operation (> 200 nm) simultaneously.
Subwavelength metamaterials allow to synthesize tailored optical properties which enabled the demonstration of photonic devices with unprecedented performance and scale of integration. Yet, the development of metamaterial-based devices often involves a large number of interrelated parameters and figures of merit whose manual design can be impractical or lead to suboptimal solutions. In this invited talk, we will discuss the potentiality offered by multi-objective optimization and machine learning for the design of high-performance photonic devices based on metamaterials. We will present both integrated devices for on-chip photonic systems as well as recent advances in the development of devices for free-space applications and optical beam control.
Optical mode sorters are a key enabling technology that have been widely used in communication and sensing systems. Conventionally, these are designed for a particular set of optical modes based on specific geometric transformation. We present a new approach for free-space optical mode sorting that can be tailored to measure any set of spatial modes or arbitrary superpositions of modes. Our approach is enabled by the combination of a reconfigurable photonics integrated circuit (PIC) interfaced with a Multiple-Plane-Light-Converter (MPLC) for pure optical mode processing. We have successfully sorted a range of high order spatial modes with crosstalk with a mean value -16dB and a reconfigurability greater than 12kHz.
Photonic integrated circuits (PICs) have been demonstrated as a promising technology to implement flexible and hitless reconfigurable devices for telecom, datacom and optical interconnect applications. However, the complexity scaling of such devices is raising novel needs related to their control systems, and the automatic calibration, reconfiguration and operation of these complex architectures both during manufacturing and in service is still an open issue.
In this contribution, we report our recent achievements on the automatic hitless tuning of a telecommunication-graded filter operating in the L band, fabricated on a commercial foundry Silicon Photonics (SiP) run. A novel channel labeling strategy is used to automatically identify the desired channel within a Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) through a FPGA-embedded closed-loop control algorithm.
The photonic architecture consists of a hitless third order Micro Ring Resonator (MRR) filter with 8 nm Free Spectral Range (FSR), integrating transparent detectors (ContactLess Integrated Photonic Probes - CLIPP) as power monitors and thermooptic actuators. Transparent detectors enable to control the input/output port of the filter without introducing any loss to the WDM channel comb. Hitless operation is achieved through a pair of switchable Mach-Zehnder interferometers used as input/output couplers of the MRR filter. The fabricated device has a 3 dB bandwidth of 40.7 GHz and provides a through-port in-band isolation of 23 dB and a drop port isolation of 25 dB at 50 GHz spacing from the dropped channel. Hitless reconfiguration is achieved with more than 30 dB isolation during channel selection.
The automatic tuning and locking technique is based on the use of a pilot tone generated locally at the node site and applied as a low frequency (few kHz), small modulation index (< 8%), amplitude modulation on the channel to be added to the network. The effectiveness and robustness of the automatic controller for tuning and stabilization of the filter is demonstrated by showing that no significant bit-error rate (BER) degradation is observed in an adjacent channel while the filter is being reconfigured. In addition, the convergence of the algorithm is shown to require only few tens of iterations, each one requiring a few milliseconds.
The FPGA-embedded control technique together with the compactness provided by SiP meets the integration requirements for high capacity networks and pluggable modules. In addition, the filter unit can be cascaded with other units to realize a multichannel reconfigurable add-drop architecture operating on several wavelengths at the same time with complete independency.
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