An Integrated Low-Voltage Broadband Lithium Niobate Phase Modulator

Abstract

Electro-optic phase modulators are critical components in modern communication, microwave photonic, and quantum photonic systems. Important for these applications is to achieve modulators with low half-wave voltage at high frequencies.Here we demonstrate an integrated phase modulator, based on a thin-film lithium niobate platform, that simultaneously features small on-chip loss (∼ 1 dB) and low half-wave voltage over a large spectral range (3.5 -4.5 V at 5 -40 GHz). By driving the modulator with a strong 30-GHz microwave signal corresponding to around four half-wave voltages, we generate an optical frequency comb consisting of over 40 sidebands spanning 10 nm in the telecom L-band. The high electro-optic performance combined with the high RF power-handling ability (3.1 W) of our integrated phase modulator are crucial for future photonics and microwave systems.

Plasmonic monolithic lithium niobate directional coupler switches

“…Recently, monolithic integration of thin film lithium niobite modulators [8][9][10][11][12][13][14] has attracted an increasing attention due to significant higher optical confinement, leading to improvements in terms of compactness, bandwidth and energy efficiency, while still demanding relatively long, on the mm-scale, interaction lengths due to conceptional limitations in the electro-optic field overlap.…”

Positive link gain microwave photonic bandpass filter using Si3N4-ring-enabled sideband filtering and carrier suppression

“…To further suppress the optical carrier to improve the RF gain, one possible approach is to use a phase modulation configuration and hybrid photonic circuits consisting SBS waveguides and ring resonators [28]. Furthermore, integrated phase modulator with a lower RF half-wave voltage of 3.5 V at 10 GHz [29] and on-chip photodetector with a higher responsivity of 1.04 A/W [30] are available on the shelf, which can be used to improve the RF gain, according to Eq. (3).…”

Rejuvenating a Versatile Photonic Material: Thin‐Film Lithium Niobate

“…In recent years, based on this rapidly-growing technology, a plethora of ultracompact integrated photonic devices and circuits, such as microdisk [59][60][61][62] and microring [46,[63][64][65][66] resonators, EO modulators, [67][68][69][70][71][72][73][74][75][76][77][78][79][80][81][82][83][84][85] acousto-optic modulators, [86][87][88][89] photodetector, [90] integrated single-photon detector, [91] grating couplers, [92][93][94][95][96] fiber-to-chip edge couplers, [97][98][99] wavelength Figure 2. Summary of the steps for fabrication of TFLN on Si wafers.…”