Breakthroughs in Photonics 2013: Toward Feedback-Controlled Integrated Photonics

We present an overview of the main achievements obtained in 2013 on the monitoring, stabilization, and feedback loop control of passive and active photonic integrated circuits. Key advances contributed to the evolution of photonic technologies from the current device level toward complex, adaptive, and reconfigurable integrated circuits

SULFIDIC GROUND-WATER CHEMISTRY IN THE FRASASSI CAVES, ITALY

A year-long study of the sulfidic aquifer in the Frasassi caves (central Italy) employed chemical analysis of the water and measurements of its level, as well as assessments of the concentration of H(2)S, CO(2), and O(2) in the cave air. Bicarbonate water seepage derives from diffuse infiltration of meteoric water into the karst surface, and contributes to sulfidic ground-water dilution, with a percentage that varies between 30% and 60% during the year. Even less diluted sulfidic ground water was found in a localized area of the cave between Lago Verde and nearby springs. This water rises from a deeper phreatic zone, and its chemistry changes only slightly with the seasons with a contribution of seepage water that does not exceed 20%. In order to understand how the H(2)S oxidation, which is considered the main cave forming process, is influenced by the seasonal changes in the cave hydrology, the sulfide/total sulfur ratio was related to ground-water dilution and air composition. The data Suggest that in the upper phreatic zone, limestone corrosion due to H(2)S oxidation is prominent in the wet season because of the high recharge of O(2)-rich seepage water, while in the dry season, the H(2)S content increases, but the extent of oxidation is lower. In the cave atmosphere, the low H(2)S content in ground water during the wet season inhibits the release of this gas, but the H(2)S concentration increases ill the dry season, favoring its oxidation in the air and the replacement of limestone with gypsum on the cave walls

A variable delay integrated receiver for differential phase-shift keying optical transmission systems

An integrated variable delay receiver for DPSK optical transmission systems is presented. The device is realized in silicon-on-insulator technology and can be used to detect DPSK signals at any bit-rates between 10 and 15 Gbit/s

Spatially resolving amplitude and phase of light with a reconfigurable photonic integrated circuit

Photonic integrated circuits (PICs) play a pivotal role in many applications. Particularly powerful are circuits based on meshes of reconfigurable Mach-Zehnder interferometers as they enable active processing of light. Various possibilities exist to get light into such circuits. Sampling an electromagnetic field distribution with a carefully designed free-space interface is one of them. Here, a reconfigurable PIC is used to optically sample and process free-space beams so as to implement a spatially resolving detector of amplitudes and phases. In order to perform measurements of this kind we develop and experimentally implement a versatile method for the calibration and operation of such integrated photonics based detectors. Our technique works in a wide parameter range, even when running the chip off the design wavelength. Amplitude, phase and polarization sensitive measurements are of enormous importance in modern science and technology, providing a vast range of applications for such detectors

Power monitoring in a feedforward photonic network using two output detectors

Programmable feedforward photonic meshes of Mach-Zehnder interferometers are computational optical circuits that have many classical and quantum computing applications including machine learning, sensing, and telecommunications. Such devices can form the basis of energy-efficient photonic neural networks, which solve complex tasks using photonics-accelerated matrix multiplication on a chip, and which may require calibration and training mechanisms. Such training can benefit from internal optical power monitoring and physical gradient measurement for optimizing controllable phase shifts to maximize some task merit function. Here, we design and experimentally verify a new architecture capable of power monitoring any waveguide segment in a feedforward photonic circuit. Our scheme is experimentally realized by modulating phase shifters in a 6 x 6 triangular mesh silicon photonic chip, which can non-invasively (i.e., without any internal "power taps ") resolve optical powers in a 3 x 3 triangular mesh based on response measurements in only two output detectors. We measure roughly 3% average error over 1000 trials in the presence of systematic manufacturing and environmental drift errors and verify scalability of our procedure to more modes via simulation

Scalable low-latency optical phase sensor array

Optical phase measurement is critical for many applications, and traditional approaches often suffer from mechanical instability, temporal latency, and computational complexity. In this paper, we describe compact phase sensor arrays based on integrated photonics, which enable accurate and scalable reference-free phase sensing in a few measurement steps. This is achieved by connecting multiple two-port phase sensors into a graph to measure relative phases between neighboring and distant spatial locations. We propose an efficient post-processing algorithm, as well as circuit design rules to reduce random and biased error accumulations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system in both simulations and experiments with photonics integrated circuits. The proposed system measures the optical phase directly without the need for external references or spatial light modulators, thus providing significant benefits for applications including microscope imaging and optical phased arrays

Establishing Multiple Chip-to-Chip Orthogonal Free-Space Optical Channels using Programmable Silicon Photonics Meshes

Two silicon photonics programmable meshes of Mach-Zehnder interferometers are used to automatically establish chip-to-chip orthogonal free-space communication links. Optimum channels with mutual isolation of more than 30dB are found even in case of a misaligned link or in presence of an obstacle in the path

Experimental evaluation of digitally verifiable photonic computing for blockchain and cryptocurrency

As blockchain technology and cryptocurrency become increasingly mainstream, photonic computing has emerged as an efficient hardware platform that reduces ever-increasing energy costs required to verify transactions in decentralized cryptonetworks. To reduce sensitivity of these verifications to photonic hardware error, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a cryptographic scheme, LightHash, that implements robust, low-bit precision matrix multiplication in programmable silicon photonic networks. We demonstrate an error mitigation scheme to reduce error by averaging computation across circuits, and simulate energy-efficiency-error trade-offs for large circuit sizes. We conclude that our error-resistant and efficient hardware solution can potentially generate a new market for decentralized photonic blockchain

Multimode Free Space Optical Link Enabled by SiP Integrated Meshes

A silicon photonic mesh of tuneable Mach-Zehnder Interferometers (MZIs) is employed to receive two spatially-overlapped Hermite-Gaussian beams modulated at 10 Gbit/s, sharing the same wavelength and state of polarization. The mesh automatically self-configures, separating and sorting the two beams out without any excess loss