Integrated polarisation handling devices

Abstract

Photonic integrated circuits (PICs) suffer from birefringence due to high-index contrast. Polarisation handling devices improve the performance of the PICs by reducing the polarisation-dependent dispersion and loss. Furthermore, there is a growing interest in building polarisation division multiplexed transceivers using PICs, which require polarisation management. The authors provide an overview of the recent work on developing polarisation handling devices such as polarisation beam splitters and polarisers in indium phosphide and silicon-on-insulator platforms for optical communications and sensing applications. These devices expand the PICs library of polarisation handling devices and can be used to design more complex circuits with advanced or new functionalities. Polarisation beam splittersPBS is the basic building block in polarisation diversity circuits, which splits and combines light with different polarisations. The incoming signal polarisation is separated into two orthogonal polarisations (TE and TM) using a PBS, which enables

Ultralow-loss polarization-insensitive silicon nitride-assisted double-etched silicon edge coupler with polarization splitting

“…Consequently, the length and insertion loss of the polarization splitter, typically tens of micrometers and around 1 dB in the literature, are saved. [24,25]. Furthermore, the device demonstrates comparable performance in extinction ratio and bandwidth, typically exceeding 20 dB and less than 100 nm, respectively, in the literature.…”

“…While various studies have merged polarization splitting and rotating devices [20][21][22][23], the integration of edge couplers with polarization handling devices remains unrealized. Furthermore, the polarization handling devices reported thus far demonstrate non-negligible insertion loss and limited bandwidth [24,25].…”

Ultra-Compact Broadband In-Line Mode Converter Based on a Width-Modulated Silicon Waveguide

“…In PICs, the mode converter consists of polarization rotators (PRs) [4], [5]and mode-order converters. The polarization handling devices, such as PRs, are used to minimize the polarization-dependent dispersion and loss [6], while the mode-order converters are more important especially when the input of some systems [7] should be high-order modes. Various interesting schemes of the mode-order converter have been reported.…”

Silicon-Based TM0-to-TM3 Mode-Order Converter Using On-Chip Shallowly Etched Slot Metasurface

“…Silicon photonics has attracted intensive research interest as an excellent platform for developing some ultradense on-chip photonic integrated circuits, due to its high refractive index contrast, low cost and compatibility with mature complementary metal-oxidesemiconductor (CMOS) technologies [1][2][3][4]. However, to meet the exponential growth demand of the optical interconnection capacity, various multiplexing technologies have been explored, such as wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM), polarization-division multiplexing (PDM), and mode-division multiplexing (MDM) [5][6][7][8][9].…”