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We report ring resonators on a silicon germanium on silicon platform operating in the mid-infrared wavelength range around 3.5 - 4.6 {\mu}m with quality factors reaching up to one million. Advances in fabrication technology enable us to demonstrate such high Q-factors, which put silicon germanium at the forefront of mid-infrared integrated photonic platforms. The achievement of high Q is attested by the observation of degeneracy lifting between clockwise (CW) and counter-clockwise (CCW) resonances, as well as optical bistability due to an efficient power buildup in the rings.

Research on microwave signal measurement techniques is risen, driven by the expanding urgent demands of wireless communication, global positioning systems, remote sensing and 6G networks. In stark contrast with traditional electronic-based realization, the implementations of microwave signal measurement systems based on integrated compact photonic chip have exhibited distinct advantages in high operation bandwidth, light weight, and strong immunity to electromagnetic interference. However, although numerous integrated microwave photonic signal measurement systems have been reported, measurement bandwidth of the majority of them is still below 30 GHz due to the bandwidth limitation of electro-optical modulators (EOMs). Furthermore, previous studies often are more focused on the measurement of one single parameter (typically the frequency) of microwave signals, which has hindered their practical application in complex situations. Here, an integrated photonic microwave multi-parameter measurement system composed of microwave frequency measurement module and microwave phase amplitude measurement module based on thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) platform is reported. Utilizing this system, not only the ultra-high bandwidth (up to 60GHz) of microwave frequency, phase and amplitude measurement with low root-mean-squares errors (450MHz, 3.43{\deg} and 1.64% of the measurement for frequency, phase and amplitude, respectively), but also the time-domain reconstruction of sinusoidal microwave signals is achieved. This demonstration further broadens the application of integrated TFLN photonic devices in microwave signal measurement technology to address the bandwidth bottleneck of the ever-growing microwave networks in the future information society., Comment: 23 pages,3 figures

In this contribution, we simulate, design, and experimentally demonstrate an integrated optical isolator based on spatiotemporal modulation in the thin-film lithium niobate on insulator waveguide platform. We used two cascaded travelling wave phase modulators for spatiotemporal modulation and a ring resonator as a wavelength filter to suppress the sidebands of the reverse propagating light. This enabled us to achieve an isolation of 27 dB. The demonstrated suppression of the reverse propagating light makes such isolators suitable for the integration with III-V laser diodes and Erbium doped gain sections in the thin-film lithium niobate on insulator waveguide platform., Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures

Photon-pair sources based on thin film lithium niobate on insulator technology have a great potential for integrated optical quantum information processing. We report on such a source of correlated twin-photon pairs generated by spontaneous parametric down conversion in a silicon nitride (SiN) rib loaded thin film periodically poled lithium niobate (LN) waveguide. The generated photon pairs have a wavelength centred at 1560\,nm compatible with present telecom infrastructure, a large bandwidth (21\,THz) and a brightness of $\sim 2.5\times 10^5$\,pairs/s/mW/GHz. The photons are correlated and exhibit a cross correlation $g^{(2)}(0)$ of about 8000. Using the Hanbury Brown and Twiss effect, we have also shown heralded single photon emission, achieving an autocorrelation $g^{(2)}_H(0) \simeq 0.04$.

High efficiency and a compact footprint are desired properties for electro-optic modulators. In this paper, we propose, theoretically investigate and experimentally demonstrate a recirculating phase modulator, which increases the modulation efficiency by modulating the optical field several times in a non-resonant waveguide structure. The 'recycling' of light is achieved by looping the optical path that exits the phase modulator back and coupling it to a higher order waveguide mode, which then repeats its passage through the phase modulator. By looping the light back twice, we were able to demonstrate a recirculating phase modulator that requires nine times lower power to generate the same modulation index of a single pass phase modulator. This approach of modulation efficiency enhancement is promising for the design of advanced tunable electro optical frequency comb generators and other electro-optical devices with defined operational frequency bandwidths.

Programmable photonic integrated circuits (PICs), offering diverse signal processing functions within a single chip, are promising solutions for applications ranging from optical communications to artificial intelligence. While the scale and complexity of programmable PICs is increasing, the characterization, and thus calibration, of them becomes increasingly challenging. Here we demonstrate a phase retrieval method for programmable PICs using an on-chip fractional-delay reference path. The impulse response of the chip can be uniquely and precisely identified from only the insertion loss using a standard complex Fourier transform. We demonstrate our approach experimentally with a 4-tap finite-impulse-response chip. The results match well with expectations and verifies our approach as effective for individually determining the taps' weights without the need for additional ports and photodiodes.

Reservoir computing is an analog bio-inspired computation model for efficiently processing time-dependent signals, the photonic implementations of which promise a combination of massive parallel information processing, low power consumption, and high speed operation. However, most implementations, especially for the case of time-delay reservoir computing (TDRC), require signal attenuation in the reservoir to achieve the desired system dynamics for a specific task, often resulting in large amounts of power being coupled outside of the system. We propose a novel TDRC architecture based on an asymmetric Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) integrated in a resonant cavity which allows the memory capacity of the system to be tuned without the need for an optical attenuator block. Furthermore, this can be leveraged to find the optimal value for the specific components of the total memory capacity metric. We demonstrate this approach on the temporal bitwise XOR task and conclude that this way of memory capacity reconfiguration allows optimal performance to be achieved for memory-specific tasks., Comment: The paper has been withdrawn by the authors due to their belief that the arguments and results presented in the paper are not mature enough, and includes a slight error

Achieving high level of pulsed squeezing, in a platform which offers integration and stability, is a key requirement for continuous-variable quantum information processing. Typically highly squeezed states are achieved with narrow band optical cavities and bulk crystals, limiting scalability. Using single-pass parametric down conversion in an integrated optical device, we demonstrate quadrature squeezing of picosecond pulses in a thin-film lithium niobate strip-loaded waveguide. For on-chip peak powers of less than 0.3 W, we measure up to -0.33$\pm$0.07 dB of squeezing with an inferred on-chip value of -1.7$\pm$0.4 dB. This work highlights the potential of the strip-loaded waveguide platform for broadband squeezing applications and the development of photonic quantum technologies.

Optical frequency combs can potentially provide an efficient light source for multi-terabit-per-second optical superchannels. However, as the bandwidth of these multi-wavelength light sources is increased, it can result in low per-line power. Optical amplifiers can be used to overcome power limitations, but the accompanying spontaneous optical noise can degrade performance in optical systems. To overcome this, we demonstrate wideband noise reduction for comb lines using a high-Q microring resonator whose resonances align with the comb lines, providing tight optical filtering of multiple combs lines at the same time. By distilling an optical frequency comb in this way, we are able to reduce the required comb line OSNR when these lines are used in a coherent optical communications system. Through performance tests on a 19.45-GHz-spaced comb generating 71 lines, using 18 Gbaud, 64-QAM sub-channels at a spectral efficiency of 10.6 b/s/Hz, we find that noise-corrupted comb lines can reduce the optical signal-to-noise ratio required for the comb by ~ 9 dB when used as optical carriers at the transmitter side, and by ~ 12 dB when used as a local oscillator at the receiver side. This demonstration provides a method to enable low power optical frequency combs to be able to support high bandwidth and high-capacity communications., Comment: 10 pages, 13 figures, 56 references

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs), inspired by biological visual cortex systems, are a powerful category of artificial neural networks that can extract the hierarchical features of raw data to greatly reduce the network parametric complexity and enhance the predicting accuracy. They are of significant interest for machine learning tasks such as computer vision, speech recognition, playing board games and medical diagnosis. Optical neural networks offer the promise of dramatically accelerating computing speed to overcome the inherent bandwidth bottleneck of electronics. Here, we demonstrate a universal optical vector convolutional accelerator operating beyond 10 TeraFLOPS (floating point operations per second), generating convolutions of images of 250,000 pixels with 8 bit resolution for 10 kernels simultaneously, enough for facial image recognition. We then use the same hardware to sequentially form a deep optical CNN with ten output neurons, achieving successful recognition of full 10 digits with 900 pixel handwritten digit images with 88% accuracy. Our results are based on simultaneously interleaving temporal, wavelength and spatial dimensions enabled by an integrated microcomb source. This approach is scalable and trainable to much more complex networks for demanding applications such as unmanned vehicle and real-time video recognition., Comment: 21 pages, 9 figures, 39 references

We report a photonic-based radio frequency (RF) arbitrary waveform generator (AWG) using a soliton crystal micro-comb source with a free spectral range (FSR) of 48.9 GHz. The comb source provides over 80 wavelengths, or channels, that we use to successfully achieve arbitrary waveform shapes including square waveforms with a tunable duty ratio ranging from 10% to 90%, sawtooth waveforms with a tunable slope ratio of 0.2 to 1, and a symmetric concave quadratic chirp waveform with an instantaneous frequency of sub GHz. We achieve good agreement between theory and experiment, validating the effectiveness of this approach towards realizing high-performance, broad bandwidth, nearly user-defined RF waveform generation., Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures, 56 references

We report a broadband radio frequency (RF) channelizer with up to 92 channels using a coherent microcomb source. A soliton crystal microcomb, generated by a 49 GHz micro-ring resonator (MRR), is used as a multi-wavelength source. Due to its ultra-low comb spacing, up to 92 wavelengths are available in the C band, yielding a broad operation bandwidth. Another high-Q MRR is employed as a passive optical periodic filter to slice the RF spectrum with a high resolution of 121.4 MHz. We experimentally achieve an instantaneous RF operation bandwidth of 8.08 GHz and verify RF channelization up to 17.55 GHz via thermal tuning. Our approach is a significant step towards the monolithically integrated photonic RF receivers with reduced complexity, size, and unprecedented performance, which is important for wide RF applications ranging from broadband analog signal processing to digital-compatible signal detection., Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, 59 references

We demonstrate a photonic RF integrator based on an integrated soliton crystal microcomb source. By multicasting and progressively delaying the input RF signal using a transversal structure, the input RF signal is integrated discretely. Up to 81 wavelengths are provided by the microcomb source, which enable a large integration time window of 6.8 ns, together with a time resolution as fast as 84 ps. We perform signal integration of a diverse range of input RF signals including Gaussian pulses with varying time widths, dual pulses with varying time intervals and a square waveform. The experimental results show good agreement with theory. These results verify our microcomb-based integrator as a competitive approach for RF signal integration with high performance and potentially lower cost and footprint., Comment: 5 pages, 7 figures, 35 references

Optical artificial neural networks (ONNs), analog computing hardware tailored for machine learning, have significant potential for ultra-high computing speed and energy efficiency. We propose a new approach to architectures for ONNs based on integrated Kerr micro-comb sources that is programmable, highly scalable and capable of reaching ultra-high speeds. We experimentally demonstrate the building block of the ONN, a single neuron perceptron, by mapping synapses onto 49 wavelengths of a micro-comb to achieve a high single-unit throughput of 11.9 Giga-FLOPS at 8 bits per FLOP, corresponding to 95.2 Gbps. We test the perceptron on simple standard benchmark datasets, handwritten-digit recognition and cancer-cell detection, achieving over 90% and 85% accuracy, respectively. This performance is a direct result of the record small wavelength spacing (49GHz) for a coherent integrated microcomb source, which results in an unprecedented number of wavelengths for neuromorphic optics. Finally, we propose an approach to scaling the perceptron to a deep learning network using the same single micro-comb device and standard off-the-shelf telecommunications technology, for high-throughput operation involving full matrix multiplication for applications such as real-time massive data processing for unmanned vehicle and aircraft tracking., Comment: 18 pages, 7 Figures, 62 References

Micro-combs [1 - 4], optical frequency combs generated by integrated micro-cavity resonators, offer the full potential of their bulk counterparts [5,6], but in an integrated footprint. The discovery of temporal soliton states (DKS dissipative Kerr solitons) [4,7-11] as a means of modelocking microcombs has enabled breakthroughs in many fields including spectroscopy [12,13], microwave photonics [14], frequency synthesis [15], optical ranging [16,17], quantum sources [18,19], metrology [20,21] and more. One of their most promising applications has been optical fibre communications where they have enabled massively parallel ultrahigh capacity multiplexed data transmission [22,23]. Here, by using a new and powerful class of microcomb called soliton crystals [11], we achieve unprecedented data transmission over standard optical fibre using a single integrated chip source. We demonstrate a line rate of 44.2 Terabits per second using the telecommunications C band at 1550nm with a spectral efficiency, a critically important performance metric, of 10.4 bits/s/Hz. Soliton crystals exhibit robust and stable generation and operation as well as a high intrinsic efficiency that, together with a low soliton microcomb spacing of 48.9 GHz enable the use of a very high coherent data modulation format of 64 QAM (quadrature amplitude modulated). We demonstrate error free transmission over 75 km of standard optical fibre in the laboratory as well as in a field trial over an installed metropolitan optical fibre network. These experiments were greatly aided by the ability of the soliton crystals to operate without stabilization or feedback control. This work demonstrates the capability of optical soliton crystal microcombs to perform in demanding and practical optical communications networks., Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures, 58 references

We report a photonic radio frequency (RF) fractional differentiator based on an integrated Kerr micro-comb source. The micro-comb source has a free spectral range (FSR) of 49 GHz, generating a large number of comb lines that serve as a high-performance multi-wavelength source for the differentiator. By programming and shaping the comb lines according to calculated tap weights, arbitrary fractional orders ranging from 0.15 to 0.90 are achieved over a broad RF operation bandwidth of 15.49 GHz. We experimentally characterize the frequency-domain RF amplitude and phase responses as well as the temporal responses with a Gaussian pulse input. The experimental results show good agreement with theory, confirming the effectiveness of our approach towards high-performance fractional differentiators featuring broad processing bandwidth, high reconfigurability, and potentially greatly reduced size and cost., Comment: 7 pages, 7 figures, 47 references

We demonstrate photonic RF phase encoding based on an integrated micro-comb source. By assembling single-cycle Gaussian pulse replicas using a transversal filtering structure, phase encoded waveforms can be generated by programming the weights of the wavelength channels. This approach eliminates the need for RF signal generators for RF carrier generation or arbitrary waveform generators for phase encoded signal generation. A large number of wavelengths of up to 60 were provided by the microcomb source, yielding a high pulse compression ratio of 30. Reconfigurable phase encoding rates ranging from 2 to 6 Gb/s were achieved by adjusting the length of each phase code. This work demonstrates the significant potentials of this microcomb-based approach to achieve high-speed RF photonic phase encoding with low cost and footprint., Comment: 11 pages, 8 figures, 46 references. Paper has been revised to update the references. No other changes have been made

We report a photonic microwave and RF fractional Hilbert transformer based on an integrated Kerr micro-comb source. The micro-comb source has a free spectral range (FSR) of 50GHz, generating a large number of comb lines that serve as a high-performance multi-wavelength source for the transformer. By programming and shaping the comb lines according to calculated tap weights, we achieve both arbitrary fractional orders and a broad operation bandwidth. We experimentally characterize the RF amplitude and phase response for different fractional orders and perform system demonstrations of real-time fractional Hilbert transforms. We achieve a phase ripple of < 0.15 rad within the 3-dB pass-band, with bandwidths ranging from 5 to 9 octaves, depending on the order. The experimental results show good agreement with theory, confirming the effectiveness of our approach as a new way to implement high-performance fractional Hilbert transformers with broad processing bandwidth, high reconfigurability, and greatly reduced size and complexity., Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures, 61 references

Recent advances in nonlinear optics have revolutionized the area of integrated photonics, providing on-chip solutions to a wide range of new applications. Currently, the state of the art integrated nonlinear photonic devices are mainly based on dielectric material platforms, such as Si3N4 and SiO2. While semiconductor materials hold much higher nonlinear coefficients and convenience in active integration, they suffered in the past from high waveguide losses that prevented the realization of highly efficient nonlinear processes on-chip. Here we challenge this status quo and demonstrate an ultra-low loss AlGaAs-on-insulator (AlGaAsOI) platform with anomalous dispersion and quality (Q) factors beyond 1.5*10^6. Such a high quality factor, combined with the high nonlinear coefficient and the small mode volume, enabled us to demonstrate a record low Kerr frequency comb generation threshold of ~36 uW for a resonator with a 1 THz free spectral range (FSR), ~100 times lower compared to that in previous semiconductor platform. Combs with >250 nm broad span have been generated under a pump power lower than the threshold power of state of the art dielectric micro combs. A soliton-step transition has also been observed for the first time from an AlGaAs resonator. This work is an important step towards ultra-efficient semiconductor-based nonlinear photonics and will lead to fully integrated nonlinear photonic integrated circuits (PICs) in near future.

In this contribution we investigate the impact of lateral leakage for linear and nonlinear optical waveguides in lithium niobate on insulator (LNOI). Silicon nitride (SiN) loaded and direct patterned lithium niobate cross-sections are investigated. We show that lateral leakage can take place for the TE mode in LNOI ridge waveguides (X-cut lithium niobate), due to the birefringence of the material. This work gives guidelines for designing waveguides in LNOI that do not suffer from the lateral leakage effect. By applying these design considerations, we avoided the lateral leakage effect at the second harmonic wavelength of a nonlinear optical waveguide in LNOI and demonstrate a peak second harmonic generation conversion efficiency of ~1160% W-1cm-2.

In this work, we show how domain engineered lithium niobate can be used to selectively dope monolayer MoSe2 and WSe2 and demonstrate that these ferroelectric domains can significantly enhance or inhibit photoluminescence (PL) with the most dramatic modulation occurring at the heterojunction interface between two domains. A micro-PL and Raman system is used to obtain spatially resolved images of the differently doped transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs). The domain inverted lithium niobate causes changes in the TMDs due to electrostatic doping as a result of the remnant polarization from the substrate. Moreover, the differently doped TMDs (n-type MoSe2 and p-type WSe2) exhibit opposite PL modulation. Distinct oppositely charged domains were obtained with a 9-fold PL enhancement for the same single MoSe2 sheet when adhered to the positive (P+) and negative (P-) domains. This sharp PL modulation on the ferroelectric domain results from different free electron or hole concentrations in the materials conduction band or valence band. Moreover, excitons dissociate rapidly at the interface between the P+ and P- domains due to the built-in electric field. We are able to adjust the charge on the P+ and P- domains using temperature via the pyroelectric effect and observe rapid PL quenching over a narrow temperature range illustrating the observed PL modulation is electronic in nature. This observation creates an opportunity to harness the direct bandgap TMD 2D materials as an active optical component for the lithium niobate platform using domain engineering of the lithium niobate substrate to create optically active heterostructures that could be used for photodetectors or even electrically driven optical sources on-chip.

The electro-optic, acousto-optic and nonlinear properties of lithium niobate make it a highly versatile material platform for integrated quantum photonic circuits. A prerequisite for quantum technology applications is the ability to efficiently integrate single photon sources, and to guide the generated photons through ad-hoc circuits. Here we report the integration of quantum dots in monolayer WSe2 into a Ti in-diffused lithium niobate directional coupler. We investigate the coupling of individual quantum dots to the waveguide mode, their spatial overlap, and the overall efficiency of the hybrid-integrated photonic circuit.

We present a new resonant behavior based on bound states in the continuum in a guided wave silicon platform. The continuum has the form of a collimated beam of light which is confined vertically in a TE mode of a silicon slab. The bound state is a discrete TM mode of a ridge on the silicon slab. The coupling between the slab and ridge modes results in a single sharp resonance at the wavelength where they phase match. We experimentally demonstrate this phenomenon on a silicon photonic chip using foundry compatible parameters and interface it on-chip to standard single mode silicon nanowire waveguides. The fabricated chip exhibits a single sharp resonance near 1550 nm with a line width of a few nanometer, an extinction ratio of 25 dB and a thermal stability of 19.5 pm/C. We believe that this is the first demonstration of bound states in the continuum resonance realized using guided wave components.

Tremendous scientific progress has been achieved through the development of nonlinear integrated photonics. Prominent examples are Kerr-frequency-comb generation in micro-resonators, and supercontinuum generation and frequency conversion in nonlinear photonic waveguides. High conversion efficiency is enabling for applications of nonlinear optics, including such broad directions as high-speed optical signal processing, metrology, and quantum communication and computation. In this work, we demonstrate a gallium-arsenide-on-insulator (GaAs) platform for nonlinear photonics. GaAs has among the highest second- and third-order nonlinear optical coefficients, and use of a silica cladding results in waveguides with a large refractive index contrast and low propagation loss for expanded design of nonlinear processes. By harnessing these properties and developing nanofabrication with GaAs, we report a record normalized second-harmonic efficiency of 13,000% W-1cm-2 at a fundamental wavelength of 2 um. This work paves the way for high performance nonlinear photonic integrated circuits (PICs), which not only can transition advanced functionalities outside the lab through fundamentally reduced power consumption and footprint, but also enables future optical sources and detectors.

Integrated photonics is a leading platform for quantum technologies including nonclassical state generation \cite{Vergyris:2016-35975:SRP, Solntsev:2014-31007:PRX, Silverstone:2014-104:NPHOT, Solntsev:2016:RPH}, demonstration of quantum computational complexity \cite{Lamitral_NJP2016} and secure quantum communications \cite{Zhang:2014-130501:PRL}. As photonic circuits grow in complexity, full quantum tomography becomes impractical, and therefore an efficient method for their characterization \cite{Lobino:2008-563:SCI, Rahimi-Keshari:2011-13006:NJP} is essential. Here we propose and demonstrate a fast, reliable method for reconstructing the two-photon state produced by an arbitrary quadratically nonlinear optical circuit. By establishing a rigorous correspondence between the generated quantum state and classical sum-frequency generation measurements from laser light, we overcome the limitations of previous approaches for lossy multimode devices \cite{Liscidini:2013-193602:PRL, Helt:2015-1460:OL}. We applied this protocol to a multi-channel nonlinear waveguide network, and measured a 99.28$\pm$0.31\% fidelity between classical and quantum characterization. This technique enables fast and precise evaluation of nonlinear quantum photonic networks, a crucial step towards complex, large-scale, device production.

We study and demonstrate the frequency conversion of UV radiation, resonant with 369.5 nm transition in Yb+ ions to the C-band wavelength 1580.3 nm and vice-versa using a reverse proton-exchanged waveguide in periodically poled lithium niobate. Our integrated device can interface trapped Yb+ ions with telecom infrastructure for the realization of an Yb+ based quantum repeater protocol and to efficiently distribute entanglement over long distances. We analyse the single photon frequency conversion efficiency from the 369.525 nm to the telecom wavelength and its dependence on pump power, device length and temperature. The single-photon noise generated by spontaneous Raman scattering of the pump is also measured. From this analysis we estimate a single photon conversion efficiency of 9% is achievable with our technology with almost complete suppression of the Raman noise., Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures