Ultrafast Nonlinear Photonics on Thin Film Lithium Niobate

 

 

Mengjie Yu

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Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Southern California

Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley

 

 

 

Lithium niobate (LN) is an excellent nonlinear photonic material due to its large electro-optic (EO) coefficient, second order and Kerr nonlinearity, along with a wide optical transparency window. Thanks to the recent advances in nanofabrication technology, monolithic LN waveguides with high optical confinement and ultralow linear loss has been achieved, which was critical to the success of the silicon-based platform in the past decade. Highly efficient and controllable light-matter interactions can be achieved using optical, electrical, or mechanical waves at extremely compact footprints. In this talk, I will review our recent developments of 1) optical frequency combs, 2) generation and measurement of ultrafast optical waveforms, and 3) mid infrared optics on thin-film LN nonlinear platform. Combination of multiple nonlinearities of LN unlocks ultrabroadband electromagnetic spectrum from microwave to mid-infrared. Lastly, I will discuss the potential of LN photonic platform for scaling up and accelerating classical and quantum technologies in sensing, photonic computing, and communication networks.