[Nature Photonics]Mid-infrared optical parametric amplifier using silicon nanophotonic waveguides

发布者：系统管理员发布时间：2010-09-07浏览次数：6306

推荐人：蔡涛

篇名：
Mid-infrared optical parametric amplifier using silicon nanophotonic waveguides 
刊名： Nature Photonics
ISSN： 1749-4885
卷期： 4卷 出版日期： 20100325
页码： 557-560 
doi： 10.1038/NPHOTON.2010.119
作者：
Xiaoping Liu1, Richard M. Osgood Jr1, Yurii A. Vlasov2 and William M. J. Green2*
1Department of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University, 1300 S.W. Mudd Building, 500 W. 120th Street, New York, New York 10027, USA
2IBM Thomas J.Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598, USA. *e-mail: wgreen@us.ibm.com
  
   
文摘： 
All-optical signal processing is an approach used to dramatically decrease power consumption and speed up the performance of next-generation optical telecommunications networks1, 2, 3. Nonlinear optical effects such as four-wave mixing and parametric gain have been explored to realize all-optical functions in glass fibres4. An alternative approach is to use nanoscale engineering of silicon waveguides to enhance optical nonlinearities by up to five orders of magnitude5, enabling integrated chip-scale all-optical signal processing. Four-wave mixing within silicon nanophotonic waveguides has been used to demonstrate telecom-band (λ ≈ 1,550 nm) all-optical functions including wavelength conversion6, 7, 8, 9, signal regeneration10 and tunable optical delay11. Despite these important advances, strong two-photon absorption12 of the telecom-band pump presents a fundamental obstacle, limiting parametric gain to values of several decibels13. Here, we demonstrate a silicon nanophotonic optical parametric amplifier exhibiting broadband gain as high as 25.4 dB, using a mid-infrared pump near one-half the bandgap energy (E ≈ 0.55 eV, λ ≈ 2,200 nm), where parasitic two-photon absorption-related absorption vanishes12, 14, 15. This gain is high enough to compensate all insertion losses, resulting in 13-dB net off-chip amplification, using only an ultra-compact 4-mm silicon chip. Furthermore, engineering of higher-order waveguide dispersion16 can potentially enable mid-infrared-pumped silicon parametric oscillators17, 18, 19 and amplifiers for telecom-band optical signals.

全文下载：