Waveguide-integrated single photon spectrometer based on tailored disorder (Conference Presentation)

In this paper a novel microwave photonics beamformer device concept, for single side band (SSB) 40 GHz modulated signals, is presented. The proposed device comprises tunable lasers, flat-top arrayed waveguide gratings (AWG), a Mach Zender Modulator (MZM), an all-pass ring resonator and photodetectors. The device can be produced as a photonic integrated circuit. The signals from the lasers (one for each beamformer radiant element) are multiplexed by the first AWG, modulated, and passed through the all-pass ring resonator. The AWG channel spacing and the ring resonator Free Spectral Range (FSR) are both set to be equal to 100 GHz. The signal is demultiplexed by a second AWG and finally photodetected. By tuning each laser within its corresponding AWG passband, the phase difference between the optical carrier and the 40 GHz microwave modulated signal for each beamformer element can be controlled. The difference is determined by the phase response of the all-pass ring resonator. A critical part of the design is the alignment between the resonances of the ring resonator and both AWGs, but this can be alleviated by using a single AWG in fold-back configuration. The power provided to each beamformer element is different due to the intrinsic non-uniform losses of the AWGs and the ring resonators, but this can also be solved either by properly setting the lasers power, or by means of additional optical amplifiers. The presented analysis is independent of the integration technology. In Silicon photonics, the AWGs and ring resonator can be produced, while the (hybrid) integration of lasers, modulator, photodetectors (and eventually amplifiers) is a challenge. The device can be monolithically integrated on semi-insulating InP technology.

Combined with the supercell technique, the plane wave expansion method is used to calculate the band structures of the two-dimensional solid–solid phononic crystals with the random disorders in either radius or location of the scatterers. Phononic systems with plumbum scatterers embedded in an epoxy matrix are calculated in detail. The influences of the disorder degree on the band structures for both anti-plane and in-plane wave modes are investigated. It is found that, with increase of the disorder degree, the band gaps become narrower with more flat bands appearing in the gaps. Both displacement distribution and response spectra show that at the flat bands, elastic waves are localised due to the presence of the disorder. Wave localisation is more pronounced at the flat bands near the lower/upper edge for the radius/location disorder. Wave propagation and localisation in a randomly disordered system with a point defect is also studied. The influence of the disorder on the point-defect state is discussed. The results show that the disorder can tune the frequencies of the defect states. It is particularly noticed that the double degenerate mode appearing within the gap of the mixed in-plane waves is split up into two separated ones when the random disorder is introduced into the system. Generally, the influence of the disorder is more pronounced for the mixed in-plane modes than the anti-plane modes. The analysis of this paper is relevant to the assessment of the influences of manufacture errors on wave behaviours in phononic crystals as well as the possible control of wave propagation by intentionally introducing disorders into periodic systems.

A novel liquid crystal on silicon (LCOS)-based wavelength selective switch (WSS) is proposed, fabricated, and demonstrated. It employs a multilayered arrayed waveguide grating (AWG) as a wavelength multiplex/demultiplexer. The LCOS deflects spectrally decomposed beams channel by channel and switches them to desired waveguide layers of the multilayered AWG. In order to obtain the multilayered AWG with high yield, phase errors of the AWG is externally compensated for by an additional phase modulation with the LCOS. This additional phase modulation is applied to the equivalent image of the facet of the AWG, which is projected by a relay lens. In our previously-reported WSS configuration, somewhat large footprint and increased cost were the drawbacks, since two LCOSs were required: one LCOS was driven for the inter-port switching operation, and the other was for the phase-error compensation. In the newly proposed configuration, on the other hand, both switching and compensation operations are performed using a single LCOS. This reduction of the component count is realized by introducing the folded configuration with a reflector. The volume of the WSS optics is 80 × 100 × 60 mm3, which is approximately 40% smaller than the previous configuration. The polarization-dependent loss and inter-channel crosstalk are less than 1.5 dB and -21.0 dB, respectively. An error-free transmission of 40-Gbit/s NRZ-OOK signal through the WSS is successfully demonstrated.

A novel, compact, on-chip spectrometer based on cascaded EG, multiple AWGs as well as PIC foundry compatible components was designed and analyzed. The proposed device operates in the spectral range of 1050 nm −1250 nm, 0.5 nm resolution, −30dB cross talk and 400 output channels.

The understanding of the underlying physics of randomly disordered systems has been subject to many different studies, especially in the field of integrated photonics. It has been shown (Redding B, Liew SF, Sarma R, Cao H: Nat Photonics 7:746, 2013) that for certain applications randomly disordered photonic systems have major advantages in comparison to conventional systems. One such application is an on-chip integrated spectrometer. Conventional spectrometer designs are based on ring resonators, so-called arrayed waveguide grating or echelle gratings. Those designs are prone to fabrication errors and exhibit a very large footprint.

A device with two identical arrayed waveguide gratings (AWGs) in a DEMUX-MUX configuration within a ring resonator is proposed and modeled. This allows extracting the insertion loss of a single AWG, independent of the coupling efficiency, with less error than previous methods.

We present a compact 4x8 wavelength-routing switch that monolithically integrates fast tunable wavelength converters (TWCs) and an arrayed-waveguide grating (AWG) for optical packet switching. The TWC consists of a double-ring-resonator-coupled tunable laser which allows rapid and stable switching, and an optical gate based on a parallel amplifier structure which prevents an input optical signal from being routed through the AWG (filter-free operation). A deep-ridge waveguide technology, employed for the AWG and ring resonators, facilitates the fabrication of the switch and makes the device compact. The filter-free TWCs achieve low crosstalk of the input optical signal of less than -22 dB. The wavelength routing operation of a non-return-to-zero (NRZ) signal at 10 Gbit/s is achieved with a switching time of less than 5 ns.

The excitonic polariton concept was introduced already in 1958 by J. J. Hopfield. Although its description was based on a full quantum theory including light quantization, the investigations of the optical properties of excitons developed mainly independently of quantum optics. In this chapter we shall review exciton polariton quantum optical effects by means of some recent works and results that have appeared in the literature in both bulk semiconductors and in cavity embedded quantum wells. The first manifestation of excitonic quantum-optical coherent dynamics was observed experimentally 20 years later, in 1978, exploiting resonant hyper-parametric scattering. On the other hand, the possibility of generating entangled photon pairs by means of this resonant process was theoretically pointed out only lately in 1999, whereas the experimental evidence for the generation of ultraviolet polarization-entangled photon pairs by means of biexciton resonant parametric emission in a single crystal of semiconductor CuCl was reported only in 2004. The demonstrations of parametric amplification and parametric emission in semiconductor microcavities, together with the possibility of ultrafast optical manipulation and ease of integration of these micro-devices, have increased the interest in possible realization of nonclassical cavity-polariton states. In 2005 an experiment that probes polariton quantum correlations by exploiting quantum complementarity was proposed and realized. These results unequivocally proved that quantum optical effects at single photon level, arising from the interaction of light with electronic excitations of semiconductors and semiconductor nanostructures, were possible within these solid state systems, despite being far from isolated systems. The theoretical predictions that we review are based on a microscopic quantum theory of the nonlinear optical response of interacting electron systems relying on the dynamics controlled truncation scheme extended to include light quantization. In addition, the environment decoherence is taken into account microscopically by Markov noise sources within a quantum Langevin framework.

The parametric interaction of light beams in nonlinear materials is usually thought to be too weak to be observed when the fields involved are at the single-photon level. However, such single-photon level nonlinearity is not only fundamentally fascinating but holds great potential for emerging technologies and applications involving heralding entanglement at a distance. Here we use a high-efficiency waveguide to demonstrate the sum-frequency generation between a single photon and a single-photon level coherent state. The use of an integrated, solid state, room temperature device and telecom wavelengths makes this type of system directly applicable to future quantum communication technologies such as device-independent quantum key distribution.

The videographic method is a simulation and reconstruction procedure that uses a statistical mathematical approach and computer graphics to aid the interpretation of scattering (X-ray, electron, neutron) from a disordered crystal. Based on the principles of optical transforms, and in contrast to it, atoms with different scattering power are represented as picture elements (pixels) with different grey levels. Compared with optical transforms, this method has the special advantage that holes of infinitely small radii can simulate different scattering powers in a mask. With the application of a statistical mathematical approach (combination probabilities), various scatterers, e.g. atoms, structure variants or domains, can be distributed in a two- or three-dimensional model. A Fourier transformation of the simulated model (diffraction pattern) can be calculated in a few s using an array processor and displayed for comparison with experiments. Real-structure image reconstruction can also be performed by amplitude and phase manipulation. As a starting model for a reconstruction, a randomly disordered structure is assumed. Under this assumption, a monotone diffuse background is obtained in the diffraction pattern. The principal idea in a reconstruction of an unknown real structure is that the diffuse regions of a partly ordered structure are a subset of the monotone diffuse background for a random disorder.

We show in simulations that overdamped interacting particles in two dimensions with a randomly disordered substrate can exhibit novel nonequilibrium transport phenomena including a transverse ratchet effect, where a combined dc drive and circular ac drive produce a drift velocity in the direction transverse to the applied dc drive. The random disorder does not break any global symmetry; however, in two dimensions, symmetry breaking occurs due to the chirality of the circular drive. In addition to inducing the transverse ratchet effect, increasing the ac amplitude also strongly affects the longitudinal velocity response and can produce what we term an overshoot effect where the longitudinal dc velocity is higher in the presence of the ac drive than it would be for a dc drive alone. We also find a dynamical reordering transition upon increasing the ac amplitude. In the absence of a dc drive, it is possible to obtain a ratchet effect when the combined ac drives produce particle orbits that break a reflection symmetry. In this case, as the ac amplitude increases, current reversals can occur. These effects may be observable for vortices in type-II superconductors as well as for colloids interacting with random substrates.

Our last experimental results on the realization of a measurement-conditional unitary operation at single photon level are presented. This gate operates by rotating by $90^o$ the polarization of a photon produced by means of Type-II Parametric Down Conversion conditional to a polarization measurement on the correlated photon. We then propose a new scheme for measuring the quantum efficiency of a single photon detection apparatus by using this set-up. We present experimental results obtained with this scheme compared with {\it traditional} biphoton calibration. Our results show the interesting potentiality of the suggested scheme.

We have demonstrated upconversion detection at the single photon level in the 2 μm spectral window using a pump wavelength near 1550 nm, a periodically poled lithium niobate (PPLN) waveguide, and a volume Bragg grating (VBG) to reduce noise. We achieve a system photon detection efficiency of 10%, with a noise count rate of 24,500 counts per second, competitive with other 2 μm single photon detection technologies. This detector has potential applications in environmental gas monitoring, life science, and classical and quantum communication.

In the 1990s, the Institute for Microstructural Sciences has maintained a research project on wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) based on integrated echelle gratings spectrometers. Major obstacles to the application of these spectrometers to telecommunications, such as channel wavelength accuracy, insertion loss, birefringence, polarisation dependent loss, compliance to flat band, and crosstalk, have been largely resolved. This technology has been transferred to the industry and our current efforts concentrate on integrated spectrometers in high index contrast waveguides. This paper reviews the advances in the echelle grating demultiplexers and in the miniaturisation of arrayed waveguide grating (AWG) spectrometers.

Optical ring or disk resonators can trap traveling optical waves in a closed path, for example, in a waveguide loop or silicon disk cavity. Energy can be added to or extracted from the cavity with the help of waveguide directional couplers. Ring/disk resonators can be fabricated with high quality factor (Q) in diverse material platforms. The high Q of these devices makes them very sensitive to small variations in (i) optical path length (phase), (ii) optical path loss (attenuation), and (iii) coupling coefficient. Any change in the optical path length can cause a shift in the resonance frequency of the ring. Whereas, the change in path loss and coupling coefficient can lead to a change in the Q of the resonator. The micro or nano opto-electro-mechanical systems (MOEMS/NOEMS) provide unique flexibility with a wide change in the tuning parameters. The tuning is obtained by either (i) displacement of the detached parts or (ii) strain in the waveguide/disk. Displacement of a structure detached from the ring/disk closer to the evanescent field can increase the effective refractive index or attenuation. The displacement of a waveguide in the directional coupler altering the gap can change the coupling coefficient. Strain from various sources can lead to refractive index (phase) and absorption changes, in addition to changing the dimensions. Mechanical, electrothermal, piezoelectric, electrostatic, and magnetic actuators have been demonstrated with MOEMS. Mechanical latching has been used to achieve nonvolatile tuning. Multi-beam supported, freestanding, and diaphragm supported structures have shown applications in sensing, optical switching, and energy conversion. MOEMS/NOEMS has recently been shown to provide the desired properties of modern sensors and photonic integrated circuits (PICs) such as low optical power consumption, high resolution, wide tuning range, low complexity, small footprint, low actuator power consumption, and compatibility with standard fabrication technologies. This chapter will start by briefly covering the basics of MOEM tuned ring/disk resonators. Then, the current technology aspects such as tuning mechanism, actuator types, and the fabrication technology will be discussed along with recent innovations. Furthermore, the evolution into NOEMS with specialized applications and materials will be emphasized along with emerging trends.