Abstract
The on-chip creation of coherent light at visible wavelengths is crucial to field-level deployment of spectroscopy and metrology systems. Although on-chip lasers have been implemented in specific cases, a general solution that is not restricted by limitations of specific gain media has not been reported. Here, we propose creating visible light from an infrared pump by widely-separated optical parametric oscillation (OPO) using silicon nanophotonics. The OPO creates signal and idler light in the 700 nm and 1300 nm bands, respectively, with a 900 nm pump. It operates at a threshold power of (0.9 ± 0.1) mW, over 50× smaller than other widely-separated microcavity OPO works, which have only been reported in the infrared. This low threshold enables direct pumping without need of an intermediate optical amplifier. We further show how the device design can be modified to generate 780 nm and 1500 nm light with a similar power efficiency. Our nanophotonic OPO shows distinct advantages in power efficiency, operation stability, and device scalability, and is a major advance towards flexible on-chip generation of coherent visible light.
Highlights
The on-chip creation of coherent light at visible wavelengths is crucial to field-level deployment of spectroscopy and metrology systems
On-chip generation of coherent light at visible frequencies is critical for miniaturization and field-level deployment for spectroscopy and metrology, for example, wavelengthstabilized reference lasers based on atomic vapors[1] and optical atomic clocks[2]
Design principles Our optical parametric oscillation (OPO) devices are based on cavityenhanced degenerate four-wave mixing, which requires conservation of both momentum and energy for the interacting optical modes[32]
Summary
We propose and demonstrate, for the first time, visible-telecom OPO using silicon nanophotonics, with a signal-idler spectral separation of ≈ 190 THz, and a sub-mW threshold power that is two orders of magnitudes smaller than recently reported infrared OPO21. Our demonstration represents a major advance for the on-chip generation of coherent visible light. Compatibility with silicon photonics and its accompanying potential for low-cost, scalable fabrication make our approach promising for integrated photonics applications
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