Field-programmable silicon temporal cloak

Feng Zhou,Siqi Yan,Yunhong Ding,Cheng-Wei Qiu,Xinliang Zhang,Jianji Dong,Huaqing Qiu,Xu Wang,Hailong Zhou,Linjie Zhou

doi:10.1038/s41467-019-10521-5

Abstract

Temporal cloaks have aroused tremendous research interest in both optical physics and optical communications, unfolding a distinct approach to conceal temporal events from an interrogating optical field. The state-of-the-art temporal cloaks exhibit picosecond-scale and static cloaking window, owing to significantly limited periodicity and aperture of time lens. Here we demonstrate a field-programmable silicon temporal cloak for hiding nanosecond-level events, enabled by an integrated silicon microring and a broadband optical frequency comb. With dynamic control of the driving electrical signals on the microring, our cloaking windows could be stretched and switched in real time from 0.449 ns to 3.365 ns. Such a field-programmable temporal cloak may exhibit practically meaningful potentials in secure communication, data compression, and information protection in dynamically varying events.

Highlights

Temporal cloaks have aroused tremendous research interest in both optical physics and optical communications, unfolding a distinct approach to conceal temporal events from an interrogating optical field
The superior time lens consists of an optical frequency comb and an electrically tuned microring resonator (ET-MRR) acting as a scanning filter, whose output wavelength is proportional to the applied voltage
Our field-programmable silicon temporal cloak is based on an electrically controllable time lens, which is compared to the state-of-the-art temporal cloak technologies with experimental verifications

Summary

Introduction

Temporal cloaks have aroused tremendous research interest in both optical physics and optical communications, unfolding a distinct approach to conceal temporal events from an interrogating optical field. With dynamic control of the driving electrical signals on the microring, our cloaking windows could be stretched and switched in real time from 0.449 ns to 3.365 ns Such a field-programmable temporal cloak may exhibit practically meaningful potentials in secure communication, data compression, and information protection in dynamically varying events. We demonstrate a field-programmable silicon temporal cloak with a record cloaking window at the nanosecond-level, benefiting from a unique electrically controllable silicon-based time lens. To break the periodicity of the cloaking window, we demonstrate, for the first time, a fieldprogrammable silicon temporal cloak with potential applications in data protection, enabling to share some public data to the user but conceal other private data in real time. We suggest that the real-time programmability of temporal cloak may make its applications, such as secure communication and data compression, more practical and closer to our daily life

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Conclusion