Electro-optically tunable microring resonators in lithium niobate

Optical microresonators have recently attracted a growing attention in the photonics community. Their applications range from quantum electro-dynamics to sensors and filtering devices for optical telecommunication systems, where they are likely to become an essential building block. The integration of nonlinear and electro-optical properties in the resonators represents a very stimulating challenge, as it would incorporate new and more advanced functionality. Lithium niobate is an excellent candidate material, being an established choice for electro-optic and nonlinear optical applications. Here we report on the first realization of optical microring resonators in submicrometric thin films of lithium niobate. The high index contrast films are produced by an improved crystal ion slicing and bonding technique using benzocyclobutene. The rings have radius R=100 um and their transmission spectrum has been tuned using the electro-optic effect. These results open new perspectives for the use of lithium niobate in chip-scale integrated optical devices and nonlinear optical microcavities.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figure

Calculation of Mutual Information for Partially Coherent Gaussian Channels with Applications to Fiber Optics

The mutual information between a complex-valued channel input and its complex-valued output is decomposed into four parts based on polar coordinates: an amplitude term, a phase term, and two mixed terms. Numerical results for the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel with various inputs show that, at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), the amplitude and phase terms dominate the mixed terms. For the AWGN channel with a Gaussian input, analytical expressions are derived for high SNR. The decomposition method is applied to partially coherent channels and a property of such channels called "spectral loss" is developed. Spectral loss occurs in nonlinear fiber-optic channels and it may be one effect that needs to be taken into account to explain the behavior of the capacity of nonlinear fiber-optic channels presented in recent studies.Comment: 30 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

Light modulation in phoxonic nanocavities

We report on the occurrence of strong nonlinear acousto-optic interactions in phoxonic structures, that support, simultaneously, acoustic and optical localized resonant modes, under the influence of acoustic losses. Deploying a detailed theoretical investigation of the acousto-optic coupling in the specific case of a one-dimensional phoxonic cavity, realized by homogeneous SiO2 and Si layers, we demonstrate the possibility for an enhanced modulation of light with sound through multi-phonon exchange mechanisms. A full electrodynamic and elastodynamic multiple scattering approach is employed to describe the optical and acoustic modes, and to account for their mutual interaction and the underlying effects both in time and frequency domains. In particular, we discuss the influence of hypersonic attenuation on the acousto-optic interaction by considering typical acoustic losses in the GHz regime

Fundamental limits on the electro-optic device figure of merit

Device figures of merit are commonly employed to assess bulk material properties for a particular device class, yet these properties ultimately originate in the linear and nonlinear susceptibilities of the material which are not independent of each other. In this work, we calculate the electro-optic device figure of merit based on the half-wave voltage and linear loss, which is important for phase modulators and serves as the simplest example of the approach. This figure of merit is then related back to the microscopic properties in the context of a dye-doped polymer, and its fundamental limits are obtained to provide a target. Surprisingly, the largest figure of merit is not always associated with a large nonlinear-optical response, the quantity that is most often the focus of optimization. An important lesson to materials design is that the figure of merit alone should be optimized. The best device materials can have low nonlinearity provided that the loss is low; or, near resonance high loss may be desirable because it is accompanied by resonantly-enhanced, ultra-large nonlinear response so device lengths are short. Our work shows which frequency range of operation is most promising for optimizing the material figure of merit for electro-optic devices.Comment: Higher resolution figures available in final publicatio