Abstract
The formation of optical solitons arises from the simultaneous presence of dispersive and nonlinear properties within a propagation medium. Chip-scale devices that support optical solitons harness high field confinement and flexibility in dispersion engineering for significantly smaller footprints and lower operating powers compared to fiber-based equivalents. High-order solitons evolve periodically as they propagate and experience a temporal narrowing at the start of each soliton period. This phenomenon allows strong temporal compression of optical pulses to be achieved. In this paper, soliton-effect temporal compression of optical pulses is demonstrated on a CMOS-compatible ultra-silicon-rich nitride (USRN) waveguide. We achieve 8.7× compression of 2 ps optical pulses using a low pulse energy of ∼16 pJ, representing the largest demonstrated compression on an integrated photonic waveguide to date. The strong temporal compression is confirmed by numerical calculations of the nonlinear Schrödinger equation to be attributed to the USRN waveguide’s large nonlinearity and negligible two-photon absorption at 1550 nm.
Highlights
Optical pulse compression provides an avenue for short pulse generation beyond that possible through mode-locking alone
New frequencies are first generated through nonlinear effects such as self-phase modulation, before anomalous group velocity dispersion is applied in the second stage to temporally synchronize all frequency components
We demonstrate on-chip, soliton-effect subpicosecond pulse compression in an ultra-silicon-rich nitride (USRN) waveguide
Summary
Optical pulse compression provides an avenue for short pulse generation beyond that possible through mode-locking alone. Its applications are many and diverse, spanning from optical metrology[1,2] and biology[3,4] to supercontinuum generation[5,6] and telecommunications.[7]. Temporal pulse compression may be implemented using single-stage and two-stage compression schemes. In the latter, new frequencies are first generated through nonlinear effects such as self-phase modulation, before anomalous group velocity dispersion is applied in the second stage to temporally synchronize all frequency components. Single-stage temporal compression schemes rely on solitons. Soliton-effect compression occurs when an input pulse simultaneously undergoes self-phase modulation (SPM) and anomalous group velocity dispersion (GVD)
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