New research shows how light propagates in integrated circuits on chips

Phys.org  January 31, 2024 While the geometry of photonic integrated circuits can be characterized by existing means, their optimal and accurate performance requires detailed characterization of the light propagating within them. Researchers in Israel demonstrated the direct visualization of the light as it travels inside photonic integrated circuits. They used the natural nonlinear optical properties of silicon to directly map the electric field of the waves guided inside the integrated circuits, characterized waveguides and multimode splitters while extracting various parameters of the device. According to the researchers their work may be crucial component for the characterization of photonic circuitry, design […]

Future sparkles for diamond-based quantum technology

Science Daily  May 17, 2021 Advancement of diamond based photonic circuitry requires robust fabrication protocols of key components – including diamond resonators and cavities. Researchers in Australia have developed a new hard masking method, which uses a thin metallic tungsten layer to pattern the diamond nanostructure, enabling the creation of one-dimensional photonic crystal cavities. The use of tungsten instead of a more conventional silicon oxide layer enables good repeatability and reliability of the fabrication procedures. The process yields high quality diamond cavities with quality factors (Q-factors) approaching 1 × 104. They showed that the cavities can be picked up and […]

New tech builds ultralow-loss integrated photonic circuits

Phys.org  April 16, 2021 Researchers in Switzerland have developed a new technology for building silicon nitride integrated photonic circuits with record low optical losses and small footprints. They used Damascene process to make integrated circuits of optical losses of only 1 dB/m. Such low loss significantly reduces the power budget for building chip-scale optical frequency combs (“microcombs”), used in applications like coherent optical transceivers, low-noise microwave synthesizers, LiDAR, neuromorphic computing, and even optical atomic clocks. The team used the new technology to develop meter-long waveguides on 5×5 mm2 chips and high-quality-factor microresonators. They also report high fabrication yield, which is […]

The chips of the future will include programmable photonic circuits

Nanowerk  October 19, 2020 The increase in complexity of circuits has introduced a generation of photonic circuits that can be programmed using software for a wide variety of functions through a mesh of on-chip waveguides, tunable beam couplers and optical phase shifters. An international team of researchers (Belgium, Spain, USA – Stanford University, MIT, Germany, Canada, Italy) discusses the state of this emerging technology, including recent developments in photonic building blocks and circuit architectures, as well as electronic control and programming strategies. They cover possible applications in linear matrix operations, quantum information processing and microwave photonics, and examine how these […]

New half-light half-matter particles may hold the key to a computing revolution

Nanowerk   October 11, 2018 An international team of researchers (UK, France) shows that by embedding the honeycomb metasurface between two reflecting mirrors and changing the distance between them, one can tune the fundamental properties of the Dirac polaritons in a simple, controllable and reversible way. They have shown the ability to slow down or even stop the Dirac particles, and modify their chirality which is impossible to do in graphene itself. The work opens the door for the development of photonic circuitry using these alternative particles and has implications for research in the field of Dirac particles…read more. Open Access […]