An All-Silicon Passive Optical Diode

By Li Fan, Jian Wang, L. Varghese, Hao Shen, B. Niu, Yi Xuan, Andrew M. Weiner, Minghao Qi. Science, 2011

713 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A Passive Optical Diode Electrical diodes are at the core of microelectronics. The optical equivalent, however, has been difficult to realize owing to the time-reversal symmetry of Maxwell's equations that describe electromagnetic propagation. Usually, a control input in the form of a magnetic field is required that breaks that symmetry. Such inputs are not practical for optical integrated circuits. Fan et al. (p. 447, published online 22 December) developed a silicon-based microresonator device that could control the asymmetric transmission of light through it. The passive optical diode was compatible with current complementary metal-oxide semiconductor processing technology and thus should be readily integrated into optoelectronic circuitry. A silicon-based device is developed that allows the asymmetric propagation of light. A passive optical diode effect would be useful for on-chip optical information processing but has been difficult to achieve. Using a method based on optical nonlinearity, we demonstrate a forward-backward transmission ratio of up to 28 decibels within telecommunication wavelengths. Our device, which uses two silicon rings 5 micrometers in radius, is passive yet maintains optical nonreciprocity for a broad range of input power levels, and it performs equally well even if the backward input power is higher than the forward input. The silicon optical diode is ultracompact and is compatible with current complementary metal-oxide semiconductor processing.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c79c467c4c07bf1f0b4f5f1cf6f8891675e5df75

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Citations in the corpus

Widely Tunable On-Chip Microwave Circulator for Superconducting Quantum Circuits (2017, background): “Different implementations of this general scheme have resulted in a variety of realizations for optical diodes constructed with silicon [91, 92, 93, 90].”
Microresonator Isolators and Circulators Based on the Intrinsic Nonreciprocity of the Kerr Effect (2018, methodology): “Other systems include spatially asymmetric “optical diodes” based on microresonator systems [21].”
Chiral metamaterials: from optical activity and negative refractive index to asymmetric transmission (2013, methodology): “The other method is to use a nonlinear medium [52, 53].”
Nonlinear waves in PT -symmetric systems (2016, background): “In order not to violate the Lorentz reciprocal theorem (see e.g. Haus (1984)), the prediction on differences in the left and right propagations of a given mode is explained by excitation of the orthogonal modes, when the input channel is changed to the opposite one (Fan et al., 2012b).”
Limitations of nonlinear optical isolators due to dynamic reciprocity (2015, background): “∇ × ∇ × Ẽ + μ0e(r) ∂(2)Ẽ ∂t2 = −μ0 ∂(2)P̃ NL ∂t2 (1)”
Parity–time-symmetric whispering-gallery microcavities (2013, background): “Unlike previous experiments demonstrating nonreciprocal transport in non-PT microresonators [34,35] and asymmetric behavior in PT-electronics [4], here we observe a complete absence of resonance peak in the forward transmission.”
Advances and challenges in commercializing radiative cooling (2019, background): “Non-reciprocal transmission generally needs to break the Lorentz reciprocity, which can be achieved in many ways, that is, magneto-optical media [61e63], non-linear materials [64], photonic crystals [65], chiral structures [66,67], and metamaterials [68,69].”