Ultra-compact optical auto-correlator based on slow-light enhanced third harmonic generation in a silicon photonic crystal waveguide

Abstract

The ability to use coherent light for material science and applications is directly linked to our ability to measure short optical pulses. While free-space optical methods are well-established, achieving this on a chip would offer the greatest benefit in footprint, performance, flexibility and cost, and allow the integration with complementary signal processing devices. A key goal is to achieve operation at sub-Watt peak power levels and on sub-picosecond timescales. Previous integrated demonstrations require either a temporally synchronized reference pulse, an off-chip spectrometer, or long tunable delay lines. We report the first device capable of achieving single-shot time-domain measurements of near-infrared picosecond pulses based on an ultra-compact integrated CMOS compatible device, with the potential to be fully integrated without any external instrumentation. It relies on optical third-harmonic generation in a slow-light silicon waveguide. Our method can also serve as a powerful in-situ diagnostic tool to directly map, at visible wavelengths, the propagation dynamics of near-infrared pulses in photonic crystals.

20 pages, 6 figures, 38 references

References in corpus (6)

• Spectral Line-by-Line Pulse Shaping of an On-Chip Microresonator Frequency Comb
• Phase-sensitive optical pulse characterization on a chip via Spectral Phase Interferometry for Direct Electric-Field Reconstruction (SPIDER)
• Wavelength-scale stationary-wave integrated Fourier-transform spectrometry
• Optical performance monitoring at 640Gb/s via slow-light in a silicon nanowire
• Demonstration of temporal cloaking
• Silicon nanowire based exclusive-OR gate using nonlinear optics for 40Gb/s DPSK signals

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• Review: Graphene oxide 2D thin films for high performance nonlinear integrated photonics
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• Complete Field Characterization of Ultrashort Pulses in Fiber Photonics
• Enhanced four-wave-mixing and 3rd order optical nonlinearity in SiN nanowires integrated with graphene oxide films
• Emerging applications of integrated optical microcombs for analogue RF and microwave photonic signal processing
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• Hydex Glass: a New CMOS Compatible Platform for All-Optical Photonic Chips