Titanium:Sapphire-on-insulator for broadband tunable lasers and high-power amplifiers on chip

Abstract

Titanium:Sapphire (Ti:Sa) lasers have been essential for advancing fundamental research and technological applications. Ti:Sa lasers are unmatched in bandwidth and tuning range, yet their use is severely restricted due to their large size, cost, and need for high optical pump powers. Here, we demonstrate a monocrystalline Ti:Sa-on-insulator (Ti:SaOI) photonics platform which enables dramatic miniaturization, cost-reduction, and scalability of Ti:Sa technology. First, through fabrication of low-loss whispering gallery mode resonators, we realize a Ti:Sa laser operating with an ultra-low lasing threshold of 290 $\mu$W. Then, through orders-of-magnitude improvement in mode confinement in Ti:SaOI waveguides, we realize the first integrated solid-state (i.e., non-semiconductor) optical amplifier operating below 1 $\mu$m, with an ultra-wide bandwidth of 700 - 950 nm and peak gain of 64 dB/cm. We demonstrate unprecedented 17 dB distortion-free amplification of picosecond pulses to up to 2.3 nJ pulse energy, corresponding to a peak power of 1.0 kW. Finally, we demonstrate the first tunable integrated Ti:Sa laser, featuring narrow linewidths and a 24.7 THz tuning range, which, for the first time, can be pumped with low-cost, miniature, off-the-shelf green laser diodes. This opens doors to new modalities of Ti:Sa lasers (now occupying a footprint less than 0.15 mm${}^2$), such as massively-scalable Ti:Sa laser array systems for a variety of applications. As a proof-of-concept demonstration, we employ a Ti:SaOI laser array as the sole optical control for a cavity quantum electrodynamics experiment with artificial atoms in silicon carbide. This work is a key step towards the democratization of Ti:Sa technology through a three orders-of-magnitude reduction in cost and footprint, as well as the introduction of solid-state broadband amplification of sub-micron wavelength light.

References in corpus (14)

• Quantum Phases of Matter on a 256-Atom Programmable Quantum Simulator
• Probing Topological Spin Liquids on a Programmable Quantum Simulator
• A photonic integrated circuit based erbium-doped amplifier
• Laser soliton microcombs on silicon
• Integrated Pockels Laser
• Intense optical parametric amplification in dispersion engineered nanophotonic lithium niobate waveguides
• Photonic chip-based continuous-travelling-wave parametric amplifier
• A Quantum Photonic Interface for Tin-Vacancy Centers in Diamond
• Probing many-body dynamics in a two dimensional dipolar spin ensemble
• Ultra-low Threshold Titanium doped sapphire Whispering-gallery Laser
• Optical Entanglement of Distinguishable Quantum Emitters
• Ultra-high Q alumina optical microresonators in the UV and blue bands
• Long-term absolute frequency stabilization of a hybrid-integrated InP-Si3N4 diode laser
• A hybrid-integrated diode laser in the visible spectral range

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Nonlinear optics in 2D materials: from classical to quantum
• High-pulse-energy integrated mode-locked lasers based on a Mamyshev oscillator
• Low-Dissipation Nanomechanical Devices from Monocrystalline Silicon Carbide
• An alkali-referenced vector spectrum analyzer for visible-light integrated photonics
• Generation of Tunable Three-Photon Entanglement in Cubic Nonlinear Coupled Waveguides