Fast-speed and low-power-consumption optical phased array based on thin-film lithium niobate platform

Abstract

Fast scanning-speed and low-power-consumption are becoming progressively more and more important in realizing high-performance chiplet optical phased arrays (OPAs). Here, we establish an integrated OPA based on thin-film lithium niobate-on-insulator (LNOI) platform to access these outstanding performances. Significantly, a lithium niobate (LN) OPA chip is implemented by 32/48 channels LN waveguides enabled by electro-optic modulations, which showcases the low power consumption (1.11nJ/π}) and fast operation speed (14.4 ns) promising the advantage of the LNOI platform for integrated OPAs. As results, we experimentally achieved a beam steering with a 62.2°*8.8° field of view (FOV) and a beam divergence of 2.4°*1.2°. Moreover, by employing sparse aperiodic arrays in waveguides design we obtained a significant reduction of lateral divergence to 0.33° for the radiation beam. This work demonstrate that remarkable advantage of LNOI platform for power-saving and scalable OPA chips for various applications.

22 pages,5 figures,conferences added