Leuthold, J.; Hoessbacher, C.; Muehlbrandt, S.; Melikyan, A.; Kohl, M.; Koos, C.; Freude, W.; Dolores Calzadilla, V.M.; Smit, M.K.; Suarez, I.; Martin, A.; Martinez Pastor, J.; Fitrakis, E.P.; Tomkos, I. Please check the document version of this publication:• A submitted manuscript is the author's version of the article upon submission and before peer-review. There can be important differences between the submitted version and the official published version of record. People interested in the research are advised to contact the author for the final version of the publication, or visit the DOI to the publisher's website.• The final author version and the galley proof are versions of the publication after peer review.• The final published version features the final layout of the paper including the volume, issue and page numbers. Link to publication General rightsCopyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.• Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research.• You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal ? Take down policyIf you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. J u e r g L e u t h o ld a n d c o ll e a g u e s J u e r g L e u t h o ld a n d c o ll e a g u e sSe e en d of ar tic le fo r fu ll au th or lis t.Illustations by Phil Saunders/spacechannel.org

Abstract:We report on high-speed plasmonic-organic hybrid MachZehnder modulators comprising ultra-compact phase shifters with lengths as small as 19 µm. Choosing an optimum phase shifter length of 29 µm, we demonstrate 40 Gbit/s on-off keying (OOK) modulation with direct detection and a BER < 6 × 10 −4 . Furthermore, we report on a 29 µm long binary-phase shift keying (BPSK) modulator and show that it operates error-free (BER < 1 × 10 −10 ) at data rates up to 40 Gbit/s and with an energy consumption of 70 fJ/bit. Huebner, C. Koos, J. Becker, W. Freude, and J. Leuthold, "Error vector magnitude as a performance measure for advanced modulation formats," IEEE Photon.

Abstract-Silicon photonics offers tremendous potential for inexpensive high-yield photonic-electronic integration. Besides conventional dielectric waveguides, plasmonic structures can also be efficiently realized on the silicon photonic platform, reducing device footprint by more than an order of magnitude. However, neither silicon nor metals exhibit appreciable second-order optical nonlinearities, thereby making efficient electro-optic modulators challenging to realize. These deficiencies can be overcome by the concepts of silicon-organic hybrid (SOH) and plasmonicorganic hybrid (POH) integration, which combine silicon-oninsulator (SOI) waveguides and plasmonic nanostructures with organic electro-optic cladding materials.Index Terms-Electro-optic modulators, photonic integrated circuits, silicon photonics, plasmonics, nonlinear optical devicesElectro-optic (EO) modulators are key building blocks for highly integrated photonic-electronic circuits on the silicon

Blade condition monitoring systems with fiber-optic sensors attract much attention because they are resistant to lightning strikes, a major issue with increasing blade lengths. However, fiber-optic sensor systems are more complex and more expensive than their electronic counterparts. We describe a new blade condition monitoring system, which combines the lightning safety of optical fibers with the reliability and cost-effectiveness of electronic sensors. The optical fibers transport data from the blades to the hub, and in addition, they provide the electrical power for operating the sensor units in the blades. To achieve full protection against lightning-induced electromagnetic fields, an appropriate shielding of the sensor units is required. We present results on the reliability of a newly developed prototype based on optically powered sensors. In a field trial, the unit monitored successfully the blade vibrations of a 1.5MW wind turbine for a period of 23months

Photonic integration has seen tremendous progress over the previous decade, and several integration platforms have reached industrial maturity. This evolution has prepared the ground for miniaturized photonic sensors that lend themselves to efficient analysis of gaseous and liquid media, exploiting large interactions lengths of guided light with surrounding analytes, possibly mediated by chemically functionalized waveguide surfaces. Among the various sensor concepts, phase-sensitive approaches are particularly attractive: offering a flexible choice of the operation wavelength, these schemes are amenable to large-scale integration on mature technology platforms such as silicon photonics or silicon nitride ( S i 3 N 4 ) that have been developed in the context of tele- and data-communication applications. This paves the path toward miniaturized and robust sensor systems that offer outstanding scalability and that are perfectly suited for high-volume applications in life sciences, industrial process analytics, or consumer products. However, as the maturity of the underlying photonic integrated circuits (PICs) increases, system-level aspects of mass-deployable sensors gain importance. These aspects include, e.g.,  robust system concepts that can be operated outside controlled laboratory environments as well as readout schemes that can be implemented based on low-cost light sources, without the need for benchtop-type tunable lasers as typically used in scientific demonstrations. It is, thus, the goal of this tutorial to provide a holistic system model that allows us to better understand and to quantitatively benchmark the viability and performance of different phase-sensitive photonic sensor concepts under the stringent limitations of mass-deployable miniaturized systems. Specifically, we explain and formulate a generally applicable theoretical framework that allows for a quantitatively reliable end-to-end analysis of the overall signal chain. Building upon this framework, we identify and explain the most important technical parameters of the system, comprising the photonic sensor circuit, the light source, and the detector, as well as the readout and control scheme. We quantify and compare the achievable performance and the limitations that are associated with specific sensor structures based on Mach–Zehnder interferometers (MZIs) or high-Q optical ring resonators (RRs), and we condense our findings by formulating design guidelines both for sensor concepts. As a particularly attractive example, we discuss an MZI-based sensor implementation, relying on a vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) as a power-efficient low-cost light source in combination with a simple and robust readout and control scheme. In contrast to RR-based sensor implementations, MZIs can be resilient to laser frequency noise, at the cost of a slightly lower sensitivity and a moderately increased footprint. To facilitate the application of our model, we provide a MATLAB-based application that visualizes the underlying physical principles and that can be readily used to estimate the achievable performance of a specific sensor system. The system-level design considerations are complemented by an overview of additional aspects that are important for successful sensor system implementation such as the design of the underlying waveguides, photonic system assembly concepts, and schemes for analyte handling.

Early and efficient disease diagnosis with low-cost point-of-care devices is gaining importance for personalized medicine and public health protection. Within this context, waveguide-(WG)-based optical biosensors on the silicon-nitride (Si3N4) platform represent a particularly promising option, offering highly sensitive detection of indicative biomarkers in multiplexed sensor arrays operated by light in the visible-wavelength range. However, while passive Si3N4-based photonic circuits lend themselves to highly scalable mass production, the integration of low-cost light sources remains a challenge. In this paper, we demonstrate optical biosensors that combine Si3N4 sensor circuits with hybrid on-chip organic lasers. These Si3N4-organic hybrid (SiNOH) lasers rely on a dye-doped cladding material that are deposited on top of a passive WG and that are optically pumped by an external light source. Fabrication of the devices is simple: The underlying Si3N4 WGs are structured in a single lithography step, and the organic gain medium is subsequently applied by dispensing, spin-coating, or ink-jet printing processes. A highly parallel read-out of the optical sensor signals is accomplished with a simple camera. In our proof-of-concept experiment, we demonstrate the viability of the approach by detecting different concentrations of fibrinogen in phosphate-buffered saline solutions with a sensor-length (L-)-related sensitivity of S/L = 0.16 rad nM−1 mm−1. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of an integrated optical circuit driven by a co-integrated low-cost organic light source. We expect that the versatility of the device concept, the simple operation principle, and the compatibility with cost-efficient mass production will make the concept a highly attractive option for applications in biophotonics and point-of-care diagnostics.

Electro-optic (EO) modulators rely on interaction of optical and electrical signals with second-order nonlinear media. For the optical signal, this interaction can be strongly enhanced by using dielectric slot-waveguide structures that exploit a field discontinuity at the interface between a high-index waveguide core and the low-index EO cladding. In contrast to this, the electrical signal is usually applied through conductive regions in the direct vicinity of the optical waveguide. To avoid excessive optical loss, the conductivity of these regions is maintained at a moderate level, thus leading to inherent RC-limitations of the modulation bandwidth. In this paper, we show that these limitations can be overcome by extending the slot-waveguide concept to the modulating radio-frequency (RF) signal. Our device combines an RF slotline that relies on BaTiO3 as a high-k dielectric material with a conventional silicon photonic slot waveguide and a highly efficient organic EO cladding material. In a proof-of-concept experiment, we demonstrate a 1 mm-long Mach-Zehnder modulator that offers a 3 dB-bandwidth of 76 GHz and a 6 dB-bandwidth of 110 GHz along with a small π-voltage of 1.3 V (UπL = 1.3 V mm). To the best of our knowledge, this represents the largest EO bandwidth so far achieved with a silicon photonic modulator based on dielectric waveguides. We further demonstrate the viability of the device in a data transmission experiment using four-state pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM4) at line rates up to 200 Gbit/s. Our first-generation devices leave vast room for further improvement and may open an attractive route towards highly efficient silicon photonic modulators that combine sub-1 mm device lengths with sub-1 V drive voltages and modulation bandwidths of more than 100 GHz.

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