Carrier recombination dynamics in strip silicon nano-waveguides is analyzed through timeresolved pump-and-probe experiments, revealing a complex recombination dynamics at densities ranging from 10 14 to 10 17 cm −3 . Our results show that the carrier lifetime varies as recombination evolves, with faster decay rates at the initial stages (with lifetime of ∼ 800 ps), and much slower lifetimes at later stages (up to ∼ 300 ns). We also observe experimentally the effect of trapping, manifesting as a decay curve highly dependent on the initial carrier density. We further demonstrate that operating at high carrier density can lead to faster recombination rates. Finally, we present a theoretical discussion based on trap-assisted recombination statistics applied to nanowaveguides. Our results can impact the dynamics of several nonlinear nanophotonic devices in which free-carriers play a critical role, and open further opportunities to enhance the performance of all-optical silicon-based devices based on carrier recombination engineering.

Photonic antennas are critical in applications such as spectroscopy, photovoltaics, optical communications, holography, and sensors. In most of those applications, metallic antennas have been employed due to their reduced sizes. Nevertheless, compact metallic antennas suffer from high dissipative loss, wavelength-dependent radiation pattern, and they are difficult to integrate with CMOS technology. All-dielectric antennas have been proposed to overcome those disadvantages because, in contrast to metallic ones, they are CMOS-compatible, easier to integrate with typical silicon waveguides, and they generally present a broader wavelength range of operation. These advantages are achieved, however, at the expense of larger footprints that prevent dense integration and their use in massive phased arrays. In order to overcome this drawback, we employ topological optimization to design an all-dielectric compact antenna with vertical emission over a broad wavelength range. The fabricated device has a footprint of 1.78 µm × 1.78 µm and shows a shift in the direction of its main radiation lobe of only 4° over wavelengths ranging from 1470 nm to 1550 nm and a coupling efficiency bandwidth broader than 150 nm.

We report on time-resolved pump and probe characterization of linear and nonlinear optical generation of free carriers in a silicon strip nano-waveguide at the 1550 nm communication band. Analytical expressions were developed to extract the carrier density averaged along the waveguide length from the measured free-carrier absorption for different input pump power levels. This allows us to discriminate the contributions from two-photon absorption (TPA) and single-photon absorption (SPA), obtaining TPA and SPA coefficients of (1.5 6 0.1) cm/GW and (1.9 6 0.1) m À1 , respectively. Our results reveal that the effective TPA within the waveguide is higher than the value reported for bulk silicon. In addition, we find that for the waveguide under test, the carrier generation via SPA plays an important role up to $300 mW, and therefore, it must be taken into account to correctly assess free-carrier effects in silicon photonic devices.

In order to meet the increasing capacity requirements, network operators are extending their optical infrastructure closer to the end-user while making more efficient use of the resources. In this context, long reach passive optical networks (LR-PONs) are attracting increasing attention.Coherent LR-PONs based on high speed digital signal processors represent a high potential alternative because, alongside with the inherent mixing gain and the possibility of amplitude and phase diversity formats, they pave the way to compensate linear impairments in a more efficient way than in traditional direct detection systems. The performance of coherent LR-PONs is then limited by the combined effect of noise and nonlinear distortion. The noise is particularly critical in single channel systems where, in addition to the the elevated fibre loss, the splitting losses should be considered. In such systems, Kerr induced self-phase modulation emerges as the main limitation to the maximum capacity. In this work, we propose a novel clustering algorithm, denominated histogram based clustering (HBC), that employs the spatial density of the points of a 2D histogram to identify the borders of high density areas to classify nonlinearly distorted noisy constellations. Simulation results reveal that for a 100 km long LR-PON with a 1:64 splitting ratio, at optimum power levels, HBC presents a Q-factor 0.57 dB higher than maximum likelihood and 0.21 dB higher than k-means. In terms of nonlinear tolerance, at a BER of 2×10 − 3 , our method achieves a gain of ∼2.5 dB and ∼1.25 dB over maximum likelihood and k-means, respectively. Numerical results also show that the proposed method can operate over blocks as small as 2500 symbols.

Phased arrays are expected to play a critical role in visible and infrared wireless systems. Their improved performance compared to single element antennas finds uses in communications, imaging, and sensing. However, fabrication of photonic antennas and their feeding network require long element separation, leading to the appearance of secondary radiation lobes and, consequently, crosstalk and interference. In this work, we experimentally show that by arranging the elements according to the Fermat's spiral, the side lobe level (SLL) can be reduced. This reduction is proved in a CMOS-compatible 8-element array, revealing a SLL decrement of 0.9 dB. Arrays with larger numbers of elements and inter-element spacing are demonstrated through an spatial light modulator (SLM) and an SLL drop of 6.9 dB is measured for a 64-element array. The reduced SLL, consequently, makes the proposed approach a promising candidate for applications in which antenna gain, power loss, or information security are key requirements.