Tunable coupled-mode dispersion compensation and its application to on-chip resonant four-wave mixing

Abstract

We propose and demonstrate localized mode coupling as a viable dispersion engineering technique for phase-matched resonant four-wave mixing (FWM). We demonstrate a dual-cavity resonant structure that employs coupling-induced frequency splitting at one of three resonances to compensate for cavity dispersion, enabling phase-matching. Coupling strength is controlled by thermal tuning of one cavity enabling active control of the resonant frequency-matching. In a fabricated silicon microresonator, we show an 8 dB enhancement of seeded FWM efficiency over the non-compensated state. The measured four-wave mixing has a peak wavelength conversion efficiency of -37.9 dB across a free spectral range (FSR) of 3.334 THz ($\sim$27 nm). Enabled by strong counteraction of dispersion, this FSR is, to our knowledge, the largest in silicon to demonstrate FWM to date. This form of mode-coupling-based, active dispersion compensation can be beneficial for many FWM-based devices including wavelength converters, parametric amplifiers, and widely detuned correlated photon-pair sources. Apart from compensating intrinsic dispersion, the proposed mechanism can alternatively be utilized in an otherwise dispersionless resonator to counteract the detuning effect of self- and cross-phase modulation on the pump resonance during FWM, thereby addressing a fundamental issue in the performance of light sources such as broadband optical frequency combs.

References in corpus (6)

• Octave Spanning Frequency Comb on a Chip
• Continuous wave photon pair generation in silicon-on-insulator waveguides and ring resonators
• Low-Pump-Power, Low-Phase-Noise, and Microwave to Millimeter-wave Repetition Rate Operation in Microcombs
• Dispersion engineered high-Q silicon Nitride Ring-Resonators via Atomic Layer Deposition
• Stimulated and spontaneous four-wave mixing in silicon-on-insulator coupled photonic wire nano-cavities
• Dark state lasers

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• Switching dynamics of reconfigurable perfect soliton crystals in dual-coupled microresonators