Compact lithium niobate microring resonators in the ultrahigh Q/V regime
Journal article, 2023

Lithium niobate (LN) is a promising material for future complex photonic-electronic circuits, with wide applications in such fields as communications, sensing, quantum optics, and computation. LN took a great stride toward compact photonic integrated circuits (PICs) with the development of partially etched LN on insulator (LNOI) waveguides. However, integration density is still limited for future highly compact PICs, owing to the partial etching nature of their waveguides. Here, we demonstrate a fully etched LN PIC platform, which, for the first time to our knowledge, simultaneously achieves ultralow propagation loss and compact circuit size. The tightly confined fully etched LN waveguides with smooth sidewalls allow us to bring the bending radius down to 20 μm (corresponding to 1 THz free spectral range). We have achieved compact high Q microring resonators with Q/V of 8.7 × 104 μm−3, almost one order of magnitude larger than previous demonstrations. The statistical mean propagation losses of our LN waveguides is 8.5 dB/m (corresponding to a mean Q factor of 4.9 × 106), even with a small bending radius of 40 μm. Our compact and ultralow-loss LN platform shows great potential in future miniaturized multifunctional integration systems. As complementary evidence to show the utility of our platform, we demonstrate soliton microcombs with an ultrahigh repetition rate of 500 GHz in LN.

ring resonators

lithium nioabte

light souce

nonlinear optics

Author

Yan Gao

Chalmers, Microtechnology and Nanoscience (MC2), Photonics

Fuchuan Lei

Chalmers, Microtechnology and Nanoscience (MC2), Photonics

Marcello Girardi

Chalmers, Microtechnology and Nanoscience (MC2), Photonics

Zhichao Ye

Chalmers, Microtechnology and Nanoscience (MC2), Photonics

Raphaël Van Laer

Chalmers, Microtechnology and Nanoscience (MC2), Quantum Technology

Victor Torres Company

Chalmers, Microtechnology and Nanoscience (MC2), Photonics

Jochen Schröder

Chalmers, Microtechnology and Nanoscience (MC2), Photonics

Optics Letters

0146-9592 (ISSN) 1539-4794 (eISSN)

Vol. 48 15 3949-3952

Helintegrerad suppereffektiv frekvenskam-sändare

Swedish Research Council (VR) (2021-04241), 2022-01-01 -- 2025-12-31.

Driver physiological monitoring for vehicle Emergency Response (DrivER)

VINNOVA (2020-05157), 2021-04-01 -- 2023-09-30.

Integrerade optiska sändare för våglängdsmultiplexering i datacenternätverk

Swedish Research Council (VR) (2016-06077), 2017-01-01 -- 2022-12-31.

Areas of Advance

Nanoscience and Nanotechnology

Subject Categories

Atom and Molecular Physics and Optics

Other Physics Topics

Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering

Nano Technology

Infrastructure

Nanofabrication Laboratory

DOI

10.1364/OL.496336

PubMed

37527090

Related datasets

Compact lithium niobate microring resonators in the ultrahigh Q/V regime [dataset]

URI: https://opg.optica.org/ol/fulltext.cfm?uri=ol-48-15-3949 DOI: 10.1364/OL.496336

More information

Latest update

9/12/2023