1. Lithium niobate photonic-crystal electro-optic modulator
- Author
-
Mingxiao Li, Jingwei Ling, Usman A. Javid, Shixin Xue, Yang He, and Qiang Lin
- Subjects
0301 basic medicine ,Signal Processing (eess.SP) ,Materials science ,Science ,Lithium niobate ,General Physics and Astronomy ,FOS: Physical sciences ,Physics::Optics ,02 engineering and technology ,Applied Physics (physics.app-ph) ,7. Clean energy ,General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology ,Article ,03 medical and health sciences ,chemistry.chemical_compound ,Resonator ,Photonic crystals ,FOS: Electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering ,Electrical Engineering and Systems Science - Signal Processing ,lcsh:Science ,Photonic crystal ,Multidisciplinary ,business.industry ,Optoelectronic devices and components ,Photonic integrated circuit ,Electro-optic modulator ,Integrated optics ,Physics - Applied Physics ,General Chemistry ,021001 nanoscience & nanotechnology ,Chip ,030104 developmental biology ,chemistry ,Modulation ,Optoelectronics ,lcsh:Q ,Photonics ,0210 nano-technology ,business ,Physics - Optics ,Optics (physics.optics) - Abstract
Modern advanced photonic integrated circuits require dense integration of high-speed electro-optic functional elements on a compact chip that consumes only moderate power. Energy efficiency, operation speed, and device dimension are thus crucial metrics underlying almost all current developments of photonic signal processing units. Recently, thin-film lithium niobate (LN) emerges as a promising platform for photonic integrated circuits. Here, we make an important step towards miniaturizing functional components on this platform, reporting high-speed LN electro-optic modulators, based upon photonic crystal nanobeam resonators. The devices exhibit a significant tuning efficiency up to 1.98 GHz V−1, a broad modulation bandwidth of 17.5 GHz, while with a tiny electro-optic modal volume of only 0.58 μm3. The modulators enable efficient electro-optic driving of high-Q photonic cavity modes in both adiabatic and non-adiabatic regimes, and allow us to achieve electro-optic switching at 11 Gb s−1 with a bit-switching energy as low as 22 fJ. The demonstration of energy efficient and high-speed electro-optic modulation at the wavelength scale paves a crucial foundation for realizing large-scale LN photonic integrated circuits that are of immense importance for broad applications in data communication, microwave photonics, and quantum photonics., Lithium niobate (LN) devices are promising for future photonic integrated circuits. Here, the authors demonstrate an electro-optic LN modulator with a very small modal volume based on photonic crystal resonator architecture.
- Published
- 2020