Ultralow-threshold thin-film lithium niobate optical parametric oscillator

By Juanjuan Lu, Ayed Al Sayem, Zheng Gong, Joshua B. Surya, Chang-ling Zou, Hong X. Tang. Optica, 2021

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Materials with strong χ (2) optical nonlinearity, especially lithium niobate, play a critical role in building optical parametric oscillators (OPOs). However, chip-scale integration of low-loss χ (2) materials remains challenging and limits the threshold power of on-chip χ (2) OPO. Here we report the first on-chip lithium niobate optical parametric oscillator at the telecom wavelengths using a quasi-phase matched, high-quality microring resonator, whose threshold power ( ∼ 30 µ W) is 400 times lower than that in previous χ (2) integrated photonics platforms. An on-chip power conversion efficiency of 11% is obtained at a pump power of 93 µ W. The OPO wavelength tuning is achieved by varying the pump frequency and chip temperature. With the lowest power threshold among all on-chip OPOs demonstrated so far, as well as advantages including high conversion efficiency, flexibility in quasi-phase matching and device scalability, the thin-film lithium niobate OPO opens new opportunities for chip-based tunable classical and quantum light sources and provides an potential platform for realizing photonic neural networks.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/afb2021e1539c4b4008bc1b54fe096e761753f85