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Asia Communications and Photonics Conference

Highly Efficient Cascaded Four-Wave Mixing in a Silicon Racetrack Resonator

Yaojing Zhang, Wen You Zhou, Yi Dan, Zunyue Zhang, Yeyu Tong, Rakesh Ranjan Kumar, Yì Wáng, Hon Ki Tsang

Published Nov 2, 2019• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

We observed highly efficient four orders of cascaded four-wave mixing with an ultra-low coupled pump power of 0.12 mW in an ultra-low loss multimode silicon racetrack resonator with a quality factor about 1 million.

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Four-wave mixing (FWM) in silicon photonics offers promising applications in optical signal processing, wavelength conversion, and quantum photonics, necessitating a comprehensive understanding of its underlying physics and limitations. Stimulated four-wave mixing in silicon photonic wire waveguides has been investigated theoretically by considering two-photon absorption, free carrier absorption, and free carrier dispersion, etc., operating near λ∼1550 nm. It has been shown that these effects severely degrade the performance when operating at higher pump power levels. We present exact numerical calculations of idler wavelength conversion efficiency and bandwidth taking into account the abovementioned nonlinearities, to show the effects of various parameters within the waveguide structure. We extended to investigate silicon photonic microring resonators in terms of the four-wave mixing performance of high-Q-value microring resonators, which are very promising as photon sources (spontaneous four-wave mixing) for large-scale quantum photonic circuits. Our analysis illustrates the limitations of analytical models in describing FWM in ring resonator behavior at a moderate input power level, necessitating a rigorous numerical approach. Experimentally, we demonstrate stimulated FWM (1525 nm≤λp≤1575 nm) in a silicon photonic wire with a cross-section of 500 nm×220 nm and with a small waveguide length of 2 mm. The idler-to-signal conversion efficiency of about −35 dB has been measured for an approximate launched pump power of 30 mW. The conversion efficiency is improved further in the microring resonator as predicted by the simulation results.
Efficient generation of correlated photon pairs through spontaneous four-wave mixing (SFWM) in silicon devices serves as a crucial resource for integrated quantum photonic technologies. Enhancing the intracavity field in high-quality-factor (Q) resonators enables energy-efficient photon-pair generation, with the photon-pair generation rate (PGR) scaling cubically with the Q factor. In this work, we demonstrate a high-brightness on-chip photon-pair source based on a racetrack resonator with a high Q factor of 1.75 × 105, fabricated on a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) platform requiring only a single-etch process. By combining uniform multimode waveguides with optimized Euler bends, we suppress fundamental mode loss and minimize round-trip cavity dispersion, thereby improving both field enhancement and frequency matching for SFWM processes. With a continuous-wave pump of only 44.67 µW, we achieve an on-chip brightness of 1.54 GHz·mW−2·nm−1. These results establish a fabrication-friendly and efficient photon-pair source architecture for integrated quantum photonic systems.
We demonstrate a high-brightness on-chip photon pair source based on a high-Q racetrackshaped silicon microresonator, achieving a quality factor of approximately 1.75×1051.75 \times 10^{5}1.75×105 and an on-chip photon pair generation brightness of 9.8MHz⋅mW−1⋅nm−19.8 \text{MHz} \cdot \text{mW}^{-1} \cdot \text{nm}^{-1}9.8MHz⋅mW−1⋅nm−1 .
Resonance shift and bistability in a silicon microring resonator operating at higher optical power levels pose serious difficulties, especially in nonlinear four wave mixing process. A solution of parking a laser wavelength around any of the resonances of a microring resonator and operating at any power levels is explored by integrating a microheater. We have shown with the existing theoretical model that the previous history of phase detuning in a silicon microring resonator determines the effective gain in stimulated four wave mixing process. The experimental results have been shown to be closely matching with the simulation results. For a microring resonator of radius 50 μm, an improved stimulated four wave mixing gain of ~ 11.6 dB has been observed while thermo-optically blue-shifting resonances in comparison to that of red-shifting resonances, for a launched pump power of 8.4 mW operating at a slightly off-resonant wavelength λp. The proposed technique can be used in designing actively controlled efficient photon sources in a large-scale integrated quantum photonic circuit operating at λ ~ 1550 nm.
In this work, we report the modeling and the experimental demonstration of intermodal spontaneous as well as stimulated four-wave mixing (FWM) in silicon waveguides.In intermodal FWM, the phase-matching condition is achieved by exploiting the different dispersion profiles of the optical modes in a multimode waveguide.Since both the energy and the wave vectors have to be conserved in the FWM process, this leads to a wide tunability of the generated photon wavelength, allowing us to achieve a large spectral conversion.We measured several waveguides that differ by their widths and demonstrate large signal generation spanning from the pump wavelength (1550 nm) down to 1202 nm.A suited setup evidences that the different waves propagated indeed on different order modes, which supports the modeling.Despite observing a reduced efficiency with respect to intramodal FWM due to the decreased modal overlap, we were able to show a maximum spectral distance between the signal and idler of 979.6 nm with a 1550 nm pump.Our measurements suggest the intermodal FWM is a viable means for large wavelength conversion and heralded photon sources.
Silicon photonics has drawn a lot of attention over the last decades, mainly in telecom-related application fields where the nonlinear optical properties of silicon are ignored or minimized. However, silicon’s high χ(3) Kerr optical nonlinearity in sub-micron-scale high-confinement waveguides can enable significant improvements in traditional nonlinear devices, such as for wavelength conversion, and also enable some device applications in quantum optics or for quantum key distribution. In order to establish the viability of silicon photonics in practical applications, some big challenges are to improve the optical performance (e.g., optimize nonlinearity or minimize loss) and integration of optics with microelectronics. In this context, we discuss how electronic PIN diodes improve the performance of wavelength conversion in a microring resonator based four-wave mixing device, which achieves a continuous-wave four-wave mixing conversion efficiency of −21.3 dB at 100 mW pump power, with enough bandwidth for the wavelength conversion of a 10 Gbps signal. In the regime of quantum optics, we describe a coupled microring device that can serve as a tunable source of entangled photon pairs at telecommunications wavelengths, operating at room temperature with a low pump power requirement. By controlling either the optical pump wavelength, or the chip temperature, we show that the output bi-photon spectrum can be varied, with implications on the degree of frequency correlation of the generated quantum state.