Coherent Phase and Frequency Detection using Sum-Frequency Mixing in Nonlinear Waveguides

Abstract

When two counter-propagating guided modes interact in a nonlinear waveguide, sum-frequency (SF) light is radiated from the waveguide surface (1). Recently, a multilayer Al x Ga1 –x Aswaveguide structure has been developed which has a SF generation efficiency several orders of magnitude larger than conventional homogeneous waveguides (2). As as a result, there is much interest in the application of SF generation in waveguides for various optoelectronic devices including spectrometers (3), correlators (4), and coherent visible light sources (5). In this paper, we demonstrate an optical phase and frequency detector based on SF mixing in a multilayer guide. The waveguide shown in Fig. 1 is pumped by two counter-propogating TE modes, Es+ andE s − , at the signal frequency w s , and two counter-propogating TM modes, E o + andE o − at the reference frequency w o .</jats:p