Optomechanical microwave oscillators

Optomechanical interaction in optical dielectric cavities can be used to generate high-purity microwave tones, giving rise to optomechanical microwave oscillators. Here, we introduce the main properties of these devices, which can be implemented in photonic integrated chips, and envisage its deployment in the mid-term in microwave photonics applications.

Compact Itinerant Microwave Photonics with Superconducting High-Kinetic Inductance Microstrips

Microwave photonics is a remarkably powerful system for quantum simulation and technologies, but its integration in superconducting circuits, superior in many aspects, is constrained by the long wavelengths and impedance mismatches in this platform. We introduce a solution to these difficulties via compact networks of high-kinetic inductance microstrip waveguides and coupling wires with strongly reduced phase velocities. We demonstrate broadband capabilities for superconducting microwave photonics in terms of routing, emulation and generalized linear and nonlinear networks.

High-performance lasers for fully integrated silicon nitride photonics

Silicon nitride (SiN) waveguides with ultra-low optical loss enable integrated photonic applications including low noise, narrow linewidth lasers, chip-scale nonlinear photonics, and microwave photonics. Lasers are key components to SiN photonic integrated circuits (PICs), but are difficult to fully integrate with low-index SiN waveguides due to their large mismatch with the high-index III-V gain materials. The recent demonstration of multilayer heterogeneous integration provides a practical solution and enabled the first-generation of lasers fully integrated with SiN waveguides. However, a laser with high device yield and high output power at telecommunication wavelengths, where photonics applications are clustered, is still missing, hindered by large mode transition loss, non-optimized cavity design, and a complicated fabrication process. Here, we report high-performance lasers on SiN with tens of milliwatts output power through the SiN waveguide and sub-kHz fundamental linewidth, addressing all the aforementioned issues. We also show Hertz-level fundamental linewidth lasers are achievable with the developed integration techniques. These lasers, together with high-Q SiN resonators, mark a milestone towards a fully integrated low-noise silicon nitride photonics platform. This laser should find potential applications in LIDAR, microwave photonics and coherent optical communications.

Theoretical bases of combined nonlinear optical demodulator-amplifer for broadband microwave photonics system

Our demodulator is based on the use of a strong light pump wave along with a signal modulated light wave. The demodulator is linear in terms of the modulation signal, which makes it possible to obtain a demodulated signal without harmonic distortion. The modulator conversion efciency and signal gain increase with increasing microwave baseband.