Ultra-low-loss on-chip resonators with sub-milliwatt parametric oscillation threshold

By Xingchen Ji, F. Barbosa, S. Roberts, A. Dutt, J. Cardenas, Yoshitomo Okawachi, A. Bryant, Alexander Gaeta, Michal Lipson. 2017

384 citations recorded by the source corpus.

On-chip optical resonators have the promise of revolutionizing numerous fields, including metrology and sensing; however, their optical losses have always lagged behind those of their larger discrete resonator counterparts based on crystalline materials and silica microtoroids. Silicon nitride (Si3N4) ring resonators open up capabilities for frequency comb generation, optical clocks, and high-precision sensing on an integrated platform. However, simultaneously achieving a high quality factor (Q) and high confinement in Si3N4 (critical for nonlinear processes, for example) remains a challenge. Here we show that addressing surface roughness enables overcoming the loss limitations and achieving high-confinement on-chip ring resonators with Q of 37 million for a ring of 2.5 μm width and 67 million for a ring of 10 μm width. We show a clear systematic path for achieving these high Qs, and these techniques can also be used to reduce losses in other material platforms independent of geometry. Furthermore, we demonstrate optical parametric oscillation using the 2.5 μm wide ring with sub-milliwatt pump powers and extract the loss limited by the material absorption in our films to be 0.13±0.05 dB/m, which corresponds to an absorption-limited Q of at least 170 million by comparing two resonators with different degrees of confinement. Our work provides a chip-scale platform for applications such as ultralow-power frequency comb generation, laser stabilization, and sideband-resolved optomechanics.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/467e1f641534ca5ef21687bd6b5733c0c2efcc06

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Dissipative Kerr solitons in optical microresonators (2018, background): “Recent measurements have revealed that Si3N4 has intrinsic material limited Q-factors that can exceed 10(7) (97).”
Large-Scale Optical Neural Networks based on Photoelectric Multiplication (2018, background): “d gate accuracy [49, 50]. However, these eects require bistability at the attojoule scale [49, 51], which is well out of the reach of integrated photonics (although recent developments are promising [52, 53, 54]). By contrast, neural networks are analog systems so the quantum uctuations set a meanin”
Flexible-Antenna Systems: A Pinching-Antenna Perspective (2024, neutral): “We ﬁrst focus on the effect of waveguide propagation loss, where the propagation loss in the dielectric waveguide is assumed to be 0.08 dB/m [19], [20].”
Ultralow-threshold thin-film lithium niobate optical parametric oscillator (2021, background): “Theoretically, Pth ∝ 1/Q(2) for the χ((3)) OPO [17].”