Sub-1 Volt and high-bandwidth visible to near-infrared electro-optic modulators

Creators: Renaud, Dylan; Rimoli Assumpcao, Daniel; Joe, Graham; Shams-Ansari, Amirhassan; Zhu, Di; Hu, Yaowen; Sinclair, Neil; Loncar, Marko

Abstract

Integrated electro-optic (EO) modulators are fundamental photonics components with utility in domains ranging from digital communications to quantum information processing. At telecommunication wavelengths, thin-film lithium niobate modulators exhibit state-of-the-art performance in voltage-length product (V_πL), optical loss, and EO bandwidth. However, applications in optical imaging, optogenetics, and quantum science generally require devices operating in the visible-to-near-infrared (VNIR) wavelength range. Here, we realize VNIR amplitude and phase modulators featuring VπL's of sub-1 V ⋅ cm, low optical loss, and high bandwidth EO response. Our Mach-Zehnder modulators exhibit a V_πL as low as 0.55 V ⋅ cm at 738 nm, on-chip optical loss of ~0.7 dB/cm, and EO bandwidths in excess of 35 GHz. Furthermore, we highlight the opportunities these high-performance modulators offer by demonstrating integrated EO frequency combs operating at VNIR wavelengths, with over 50 lines and tunable spacing, and frequency shifting of pulsed light beyond its intrinsic bandwidth (up to 7x Fourier limit) by an EO shearing method.

Additional Information

© The Author(s) 2023. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. This work was supported in part by AFOSR FA9550-20-1-0105 (M.L.), FA9550-19-1-0376 (M.L.), ARO MURI W911NF1810432 (M.L.), NSF EEC-1941583 (M.L.), OMA-2137723 (M.L.), and OMA-2138068 (M.L.), DOE DE-SC0020376 (M.L.), MIT Lincoln Lab 7000514813 (M.L.), AWS Center for Quantum Networking's research alliance with the Harvard Quantum Initiative (M.L.), Ford Foundation Fellowship, (D.R.), NSF GRFP No. DGE1745303 (D.R., D.A.), NSERC PGSD scholarship (G.J.), Harvard Quantum Initiative (HQI) postdoctoral fellowship (D.Z.), A*STAR Central Research Fund (D.Z.), AQT Intelligent Quantum Networks and Technologies (N.S.), and NSF Center for Integrated Quantum Materials No. DMR-1231319 (D.R., N.S.). We acknowledge fruitful discussions with Lingyan He, Prashanta Kharel, Ben Dixon, and Alex Zhang. Device fabrication was performed at the Center for Nanoscale Systems (CNS), a member of the National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure Network (NNCI), which is supported by the National Science Foundation under NSF Grant No. 1541959. These authors contributed equally: Dylan Renaud, Daniel Rimoli Assumpcao. Contributions. G.J. and D.R. designed devices. D.R. fabricated devices. D.A., D.R., and G.J. designed and performed the measurements. A.S. assisted with electronics measurements. D.A., D.R., and D.Z. analyzed the data. Y.H. provided a theory on frequency combs. D.R., D.A., and A.S. wrote the manuscript with extensive input from the other authors. M.L. and N.S. supervised the project. These authors contributed equally: D.R. and D.A. Data availability. All data that supports the conclusions of this study are included in the article and the Supplementary Information file. The data presented in this study is available from the corresponding authors upon request. Competing interests. M.L. is involved in developing lithium niobate technologies at HyperLight Corporation. The remaining authors declare no competing interests.

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