Lithium niobate photonic-crystal electro-optic modulator.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 32807775.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-020-17950-7 and PMC identifier 7431411.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
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<sup>-1</sup>, a broad modulation bandwidth of 17.5 GHz, while with a tiny electro-optic modal volume of only 0.58 μm<sup>3</sup>. 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<sup>-1</sup> 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.