High-pulse-energy integrated mode-locked lasers based on a Mamyshev oscillator

Abstract

Ultrafast lasers have unlocked numerous advances across science and technology: they enable corneal surgery, reveal chemical reaction dynamics, and underpin optical atomic clocks. Over the past decades, extensive efforts have been devoted to developing photonic integrated circuit-based mode-locked lasers that are compact, scalable, and compatible with further on-chip functionalities. Yet, existing implementations fall short of pulse energies required for their subsequent uses in nonlinear applications. In this work, we demonstrate the first mode-locked laser that overcomes this limitation in low-loss erbium-doped silicon nitride photonic integrated circuits. The laser is based on the Mamyshev oscillator architecture, which employs alternating spectral filtering and self-phase modulation for mode-locking. It delivers a 176 MHz stream of pulses with nanojoule energy, comparable to fiber lasers and surpassing previous photonic integrated sources by more than two orders of magnitude. The output pulses exhibit excellent coherence, can be linearly compressed to 147 fs and directly drive a 1.5-octave-spanning supercontinuum in an integrated waveguide. Our work establishes a new generation of high-pulse-energy photonic integrated mode-locked lasers and paves the way for their widespread adoption.

References in corpus (14)

• Photonic chip based optical frequency comb using soliton induced Cherenkov radiation
• High-yield wafer-scale fabrication of ultralow-loss, dispersion-engineered silicon nitride photonic circuits
• A photonic integrated circuit based erbium-doped amplifier
• Mid-infrared frequency comb generation with silicon nitride nano-photonic waveguides
• Integrated Electro-Optic Isolator on Thin Film Lithium Niobate
• High-channel-count 20 GHz passively mode locked quantum dot laser directly grown on Si with 4.1 Tbit/s transmission capacity
• Thermo-refractive noise in silicon nitride microresonators
• Power-efficient soliton microcombs
• Photonic chip-based continuous-travelling-wave parametric amplifier
• Titanium:Sapphire-on-insulator for broadband tunable lasers and high-power amplifiers on chip
• Plasmonic photoconductive terahertz focal-plane array with pixel super-resolution
• Starting Dynamics of a Fully Electronically Controlled Linear Mamyshev Oscillator
• Foundry compatible, efficient wafer-scale manufacturing of ultra-low loss, high-density Si${}_3$N${}_4$ photonic integrated circuits
• Full C- and L-band tunable erbium-doped integrated lasers via scalable manufacturing