Thermal phase shifters for femtosecond laser written photonic integrated circuits

Abstract

Photonic integrated circuits (PICs) are today acknowledged as an effective solution to fulfill the demanding requirements of many practical applications in both classical and quantum optics. Phase shifters integrated in the photonic circuit offer the possibility to dynamically reconfigure its properties in order to fine tune its operation or to produce adaptive circuits, thus greatly extending the quality and the applicability of these devices. In this paper, we provide a thorough discussion of the main problems that one can encounter when using thermal shifters to reconfigure photonic circuits. We then show how all these issues can be solved by a careful design of the thermal shifters and by choosing the most appropriate way to drive them. Such performance improvement is demonstrated by manufacturing thermal phase shifters in femtosecond laser written PICs (FLW-PICs), and by characterizing their operation in detail. The unprecedented results in terms of power dissipation, miniaturization and stability, enable the scalable implementation of reconfigurable FLW-PICs that can be easily calibrated and exploited in the applications.

References in corpus (5)

• Silica-on-Silicon Waveguide Quantum Circuits
• Efficient, Compact and Low Loss Thermo-Optic Phase Shifter in Silicon
• Manipulating multi-photon entanglement in waveguide quantum circuits
• Quantum teleportation on a photonic chip
• Experimental multiphase estimation on a chip

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Femtosecond laser micromachining for integrated quantum photonics
• 2023 Astrophotonics Roadmap: pathways to realizing multi-functional integrated astrophotonic instruments
• Experimental certification of contextuality, coherence and dimension in a programmable universal photonic processor
• Toward Higher Integration Density in Femtosecond-Laser-Written Programmable Photonic Circuits