An optical-frequency synthesizer using integrated photonics

By D. Spencer, T. Drake, T. Briles, J. Stone, L. Sinclair, C. Fredrick, Qing Li, D. Westly, B. Ilic, A. Bluestone and 17 more. Nature, 2017

698 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Optical-frequency synthesizers, which generate frequency-stable light from a single microwave-frequency reference, are revolutionizing ultrafast science and metrology, but their size, power requirement and cost need to be reduced if they are to be more widely used. Integrated-photonics microchips can be used in high-coherence applications, such as data transmission1, highly optimized physical sensors2 and harnessing quantum states3, to lower cost and increase efficiency and portability. Here we describe a method for synthesizing the absolute frequency of a lightwave signal, using integrated photonics to create a phase-coherent microwave-to-optical link. We use a heterogeneously integrated III–V/silicon tunable laser, which is guided by nonlinear frequency combs fabricated on separate silicon chips and pumped by off-chip lasers. The laser frequency output of our optical-frequency synthesizer can be programmed by a microwave clock across 4 terahertz near 1,550 nanometres (the telecommunications C-band) with 1 hertz resolution. Our measurements verify that the output of the synthesizer is exceptionally stable across this region (synthesis error of 7.7 × 10−15 or below). Any application of an optical-frequency source could benefit from the high-precision optical synthesis presented here. Leveraging high-volume semiconductor processing built around advanced materials could allow such low-cost, low-power and compact integrated-photonics devices to be widely used. An optical-frequency synthesizer based on stabilized frequency combs has been developed utilizing chip-scale devices as key components, in a move towards using integrated photonics technology for ultrafast science and metrology.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c9f16e7af3a80b4d2fe67657eb3e0308e889cdcc

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Citations in the corpus

Photonic RF Phase-Encoded Signal Generation With a Microcomb Source (2020, background): “Integrated microcombs [19]–[24], generated through optical parametric oscillation in monolithic microring resonators (MRRs), are promising multi-wavelength sources that offer”
A self-starting bi-chromatic LiNbO3 soliton microcomb (2018, methodology): “On-chip generation of optical frequency combs via the Kerr nonlinearity has attracted significant interest in recent years [1] and the use of these devices for comb systems on a chip is being studied across a wide range of applications including spectroscopy [2, 3], communications [4], ranging [5, 6”
Dissipative Kerr solitons in optical microresonators (2018, background): “(136), and astrophysical spectrometer calibration for exoplanet detection (49).”
Photonic RF and microwave filters based on 49 GHz and 200 GHz Kerr microcombs (2020, background): “cs [49 -58]. Most recently, Kerr micro[53 -combs have demonstrated their enormous potential for sources for ultrahigh bandwidth coherent optical fiber communications [59], optical frequency synthesis [60] and many other applications [61- 68]. The success of these new CMOS platforms as well as other ”
Optical data transmission at 44Tb/s and 10 bits/s/Hz over the C-band with standard fibre and a single micro-comb source (2020, background): “The discovery of temporal soliton states (DKS – dissipative Kerr solitons) [4,7-11] as a means of mode-locking microcombs has enabled breakthroughs in many fields including spectroscopy [12,13], microwave photonics [14], frequency synthesis [15], optical ranging [16,17], quantum sources [18,19], met”