Highly tunable efficient second-harmonic generation in a lithium niobate nanophotonic waveguide

By Rui Luo, Yang He, Hanxiao Liang, Mingxiao Li, Qiang Lin. Optica, 2018

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Highly-tunable coherent light generation is crucial for many important photonic applications. Second-harmonic generation (SHG) is a dominant approach for this purpose, which, however, exhibits a trade-off between the conversion efficiency and the wavelength tunability in a conventional nonlinear platform. Recent development of the integrated lithium niobate (LN) technology makes it possible to achieve a large wavelength tuning while maintaining a high conversion efficiency. Here we report on-chip SHG that simultaneously achieves a large tunability and a high conversion efficiency inside a single device. We utilize the unique strong thermo-optic birefringence of LN to achieve flexible temperature tuning of type-I inter-modal phase matching. We experimentally demonstrate spectral tuning with a tuning slope of 0.84 nm/K for a telecom-band pump, and a nonlinear conversion efficiency of 4.7% W$^{-1}$, in a LN nanophotonic waveguide only 8~mm long. Our device shows great promise for efficient on-chip wavelength conversion to produce highly-tunable coherent visible light for broad applications, while taking advantage of the mature and cost-effective telecom laser technology.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7832a500a4a49ca11c60c12f5fdc61d1eab3f30a