Search

Driven by narrow-linewidth bench-top lasers, coherent optical systems spanning optical communications, metrology and sensing provide unrivalled performance. To transfer these capabilities from the laboratory to the real world, a key missing ingredient is a mass-produced integrated laser with superior coherence. Here, we bridge conventional semiconductor lasers and coherent optical systems using CMOS-foundry-fabricated microresonators with record high $Q$ factor over 260 million and finesse over 42,000. Five orders-of-magnitude noise reduction in the pump laser is demonstrated, and for the first time, fundamental noise below 1 Hz$^2$ Hz$^{-1}$ is achieved in an electrically-pumped integrated laser. Moreover, the same configuration is shown to relieve dispersion requirements for microcomb generation that have handicapped certain nonlinear platforms. The simultaneous realization of record-high $Q$ factor, highly coherent lasers and frequency combs using foundry-based technologies paves the way for volume manufacturing of a wide range of coherent optical systems., Comment: 19 pages, 11 figures

Optical gyroscopes are among the most accurate rotation measuring devices and are widely used for navigation and accurate pointing. Since the advent of photonic integrated components for communications, and with their increasing complexity, there has been interest in the possibility of chip-scale optical gyroscopes1. Besides the potential benefits of integration, such solid-state systems would be robust and resistant to shock. Here, we report a gyroscope using Brillouin ring lasers on a silicon chip. Its stability and sensitivity enable measurement of Earth’s rotation, representing a major milestone for this new class of gyroscope. A Sagnac gyroscope based on Brillouin ring lasers on a silicon chip is presented. The stability and sensitivity of this on-chip planar gyroscope allow measurement of the Earth’s rotation, with an amplitude sensitivity as small as 5 deg h−1 for a sinusoidal rotation, an angle random walk of 0.068 deg h−1/2 and bias instability of 3.6 deg h−1.

Solitons occur in many physical systems when a nonlinearity compensates wave dispersion. Their recent formation in microresonators opens a new research direction for nonlinear optical physics and provides a platform for miniaturization of spectroscopy and frequency metrology systems. These microresonator solitons orbit around a closed waveguide path and produce a repetitive output pulse stream at a rate set by the round-trip time. In this work counter-propagating solitons that simultaneously orbit in an opposing sense (clockwise/counter-clockwise) are studied. Despite sharing the same spatial mode family, their round-trip times can be precisely and independently controlled. Furthermore, a state is possible in which both the relative optical phase and relative repetition rates of the distinct soliton streams are locked. This state allows a single resonator to produce dual-soliton frequency-comb streams having different repetition rates, but with high relative coherence useful in both spectroscopy and laser ranging systems., Qi-Fan Yang and Xu Yi contributed equally to this work