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Polarization manipulation is essential in photonic integrated circuits and has numerous applications in various fields, such as optical communication, nonlinear optics, and quantum optics. Advances in nanofabrication have enabled the integration of subwavelength‐structured metamaterials on optical waveguides, providing unprecedented optical manipulation capabilities beyond classical waveguide‐based architectures. In this paper, the polarization space is demonstrated to be fully manipulated by a dielectric metamaterial composed of nanoholes and nanoslots. This approach offers competitive performances for key polarization components, including the polarizer, polarization beam splitter, and polarization‐splitter‐rotator, while maintaining ultra‐compact coupling regions of 18×1 µm2, 16×1.1 µm2, and 13×1 µm2 respectively. The devices are designed by manipulating the phase and amplitude of all possible eigenmodes supported in the waveguide, which is inherently scalable and versatile for on‐chip mode and wavefront manipulation. The unique properties of metamaterials provide powerful tools for on‐chip polarization manipulation and offer new possibilities for the development of compact and high‐performance photonic integrated circuits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Silicon photonics is becoming a competitive technology to settle the issues of power and speed in data centers and computing systems. However, the absence of an on‐chip light source restricts the wide and deep application of silicon photonics. Essentially, efficient edge coupling from a Si‐based III‐V laser to silicon photonic components remains the major obstacle for on‐chip integration. Here, two compact edge couplers with ultra‐low coupling loss and eased fabrication for the light transmission from a Si‐based III‐V laser to Si3N4 waveguide are realized. An ultra‐low laser‐to‐chip coupling loss of only 1.175 dB for the butt coupling of a Si‐based InAs QD laser is experimentally demonstrated with high alignment tolerance. The strategies presented here provide a competitive solution for realizing ultra‐efficient integration of Si‐based light sources and silicon photonic components. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wavelength‐division multiplexing (WDM) technology can offer considerable parallelism for large‐capacity data communications. While several configurations have been demonstrated to realize on‐chip WDM systems, their practical applications might be hindered by large footprints or compromised performances. Recently, metamaterial‐assisted silicon photonics is emerging for on‐chip light manipulation by subwavelength‐scale control of optical wavefronts. They can reach more compact footprints and broadband functionalities beyond the classical waveguide‐based architectures. Herein, wavelength (de)multiplexers are experimentally demonstrated in the subwavelength‐structured metamaterials regime with highly compact footprints. Two‐dimensional metamaterials composed of quasi‐periodic dielectric perturbation arrays patterned on a multimode waveguide are proposed to stimulate multiple high‐order waveguide modes at different wavelengths, which are then coupled to different WDM channels by cascading mode (de)multiplexers. The four‐channel wavelength (de)multiplexer is demonstrated in a box‐like spectrum with a compact footprint of 2.5 × 250 µm2, with the measured losses less than 2 dB and channel crosstalk less than –14.3 dB. By varying the patterned metamaterial structures, the proposed devices also have the merits of flexible operating wavelengths and bandwidths. The concept features large scalability, compactness, and competitive performance, which can offer versatile on‐chip light manipulation and significantly improve the integration density for various on‐chip WDM optical systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neuromorphic photonics that aims to process and store information simultaneously like human brains has emerged as a promising alternative for next generation intelligent computing systems. The implementation of hardware emulating the basic functionality of neurons and synapses is the fundamental work in this field. However, previously proposed optical neurons implemented with SOA-MZIs, modulators, lasers or phase change materials are all dependent on active devices and pose challenges for integration. Meanwhile, although the nonlinearity in nanocavities has long been of interest, the previous theories are intended for specific situations, e.g., self-pulsation in microrings, and there is still a lack of systematic studies in the excitability behavior of the nanocavities including the silicon photonic crystal cavities. Here, we report for the first time a universal coupled mode theory model for all side-coupled passive microresonators. The excitability of microresonators resulting from the subcritical Andronov-Hopf bifurcation is categorized as Class 2 neural excitability and can be used to mimic the Hodgkin-Huxley neuron model. We demonstrate that the microresonator-based neuron can exhibit the typical characteristics of spiking neurons: excitability threshold, leaky integrating dynamics, refractory period, cascadability and inhibitory spiking behavior, paving the way to realize all-optical spiking neural networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ultra-compact mode-order converters with dielectric slots are demonstrated on a silicon-on-insulator platform. We propose a mode converter that converts the TE0 mode into the TE1 mode with an ultra-small footprint of only 0.8×1.2µ m 2 . The measured insertion loss is less than 1.2 dB from 1520 nm to 1570 nm. To reduce the insertion loss, we further optimize the structure and design two mode converters that convert the TE0 mode into the TE1 mode and the TE2 mode with footprints of 0.88×2.3µ m 2 and 1.4×2.4µ m 2 , respectively. Their measured insertion losses are both less than 0.5 dB. Additionally, the proposed devices are cascadable and scalable for high-order mode conversion.