Enhanced wavelength conversion and photon pair generation using slow light effects and electronic carrier sweepout in silicon photonics devices

Abstract

Silicon photonics has drawn a lot of attention over the last decades, mainly in telecom-related application fields where the nonlinear optical properties of silicon are ignored or minimized. However, silicon’s high χ⁽³⁾ Kerr optical nonlinearity in sub-micron-scale high-confinement waveguides can enable significant improvements in traditional nonlinear devices, such as for wavelength conversion, and also enable some device applications in quantum optics or for quantum key distribution. In order to establish the viability of silicon photonics in practical applications, some big challenges are to improve the optical performance (e.g., optimize nonlinearity or minimize loss) and integration of optics with microelectronics. In this context, we discuss how electronic PIN diodes improve the performance of wavelength conversion in a microring resonator based four-wave mixing device, which achieves a continuous-wave four-wave mixing conversion efficiency of −21.3 dB at 100 mW pump power, with enough bandwidth for the wavelength conversion of a 10 Gbps signal. In the regime of quantum optics, we describe a coupled microring device that can serve as a tunable source of entangled photon pairs at telecommunications wavelengths, operating at room temperature with a low pump power requirement. By controlling either the optical pump wavelength, or the chip temperature, we show that the output bi-photon spectrum can be varied, with implications on the degree of frequency correlation of the generated quantum state.