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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]

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]

Metamaterial-enabled Fully On-Chip Polarization-Handling Devices (Laser Photonics Rev. 17(11)/2023) This work paves the way for the practical utilization of polarization in photonics, including polarization diversity circuits, nonlinear photonics, optical analog computing, and beyond. Polarization-handling devices are demonstrated with competitive performance and ultra-compact footprint, including the polarizer, polarization beam splitter, polarization rotator, and polarization-splitter-rotator. [Extracted from the article]

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]