Ion-sliced thin-film lithium niobate (LN) compact waveguide technology has facilitated the resurgence of integrated photonics based on lithium niobate. These thin-film LN waveguides offer over an order of magnitude improvement in optical confinement, and about two orders of magnitude reduction in waveguide bending radius, compared to conventional LN waveguides. Harnessing the improved confinement, a variety of miniaturized and efficient photonic devices are demonstrated in this work. First, two types of compact electrooptic modulators are presented – microring modulators, and Mach-Zehnder modulators. Next, two distinct approaches to nonlinear optical frequency converters are implemented – periodically poled lithium niobate, and mode shape modulation (grating assisted quasi-phase matching). Following this, stochastic variations are added to the mode shape modulation approach to demonstrate random quasi-phase matching. Afterward, broadband photon-pair generation is demonstrated in the miniaturized periodically poled lithium niobate, and spectral correlations of the biphoton spectrum are reported. Finally, extensions of the aforementioned results suitable for future work are discussed
