Fast electrical switching of orbital angular momentum modes using ultra-compact integrated vortex emitters

Abstract

The ability to rapidly switch between orbital angular momentum modes of light has important implications for future classical and quantum systems. In general, orbital angular momentum beams are generated using free-space bulk optical components where the fastest reconfiguration of such systems is around a millisecond using spatial light modulators. In this work, an extremely compact optical vortex emitter is demonstrated with the ability to actively tune between different orbital angular momentum modes. The emitter is tuned using a single electrically contacted thermo-optical control, maintaining device simplicity and micron scale footprint. On-off keying and orbital angular momentum mode switching are achieved at rates of 10 ms and 20 ms respectively.

Chip-to-chip quantum photonic interconnect by path-polarization interconversion

“…The efficiency and fidelity [47,48] of this interconversion process can be improved, and other off--chip encodings (e.g. orbital angular momentum [54,55] or time bin [56]) may further enrich this quantum interconnectivity. The spiral photon--pair sources used here require no tuning to achieve spectral overlap, whereas optical microring resonators facilitate higher photon flux, produce spectrally uncorrelated photons [23,57], and have a smaller footprint, but require careful tuning.…”

Roadmap on structured light

“…Developments inmetamaterials [21] and nanostructured materials may hold promise in this regard [109], particularly for integration with fibre optical delivery of structured fields, while early work on organic laser systems suggests a new technology in the future for energy efficient sources of structured light [238]. Integrated silicon photonics, with on-chip generation of novel light fields, have already been demonstrated [111,239] and applied, for example, in communications.…”

Two-layer interconnection network architectures based on integrated concentric orbital angular momentum emitters

“…Fig. 3 (b) shows total number of ports K=MN vs Dmax and S, fixing Dmin to 80µm [6]. For S=6µm, Dmax=200µm is required to have 10 concentric OAM emitters.…”

“…The OAM modulator can be implemented with single integrated microrings with a superimposed grating, which emit the OAM beam in a direction orthogonal with respect to the microring plane [5]. The order of the converted signal is set with a control signal (Ci) by thermal tuning [6]. Since the NM OAM emitters/modulators are concentric, the OAM signals with different OAM orders coming from different ports are spatially multiplexed.…”