Efficient and broadband optical parametric four wave mixing in chalcogenide-PMMA hybrid microwires

TL;DR

This paper reports the development of chalcogenide-PMMA hybrid microwires that enable efficient, broadband four-wave mixing with low power thresholds, high conversion efficiency, and broad spectral bandwidth for advanced photonic applications.

Contribution

The authors demonstrate a novel fabrication of polymer-cladded chalcogenide microwires achieving high-performance FWM with significantly improved bandwidth and efficiency over previous devices.

Findings

Achieved 70-370 mW threshold for wavelength conversion

Realized 190 nm bandwidth in FWM process

Attained up to 21 dB conversion efficiency

Abstract

The recent development of devices based on novel nonlinear materials like chalcogenides (ChGs), silicon (Si) and other semi-conductors has revolutionized the field of nonlinear photonics [1,2,3]. Among the nonlinear effects observed in these materials, four-wave mixing (FWM) is the process that finds the most applications including wavelength conversion [4], optical regeneration [5,6], optical delay [7], time-domain demultiplexing[8], temporal cloaking[9] and negative refraction[10]. Although FWM has been observed in several media including chalcogenides [11,12,13,14], silicon[15, 16], bismuth [17] and silica [18,19], there is a continued quest for devices that realize efficient and broadband FWM while offering compactness, low-power consumption and compatibility with optical fibers. Here, we demonstrate the fabrication of 10 cm long polymer cladded chalcogenide (As2Se3) microwires to realize FWM-led sub watt threshold (70-370 mW) wavelength conversion with a 12 dB bandwidth as broad as 190 nm, and conversion efficiency as high as 21 dB. This represents a 3-30 \times increase in bandwidth and 30-50 dB improvement in conversion efficiency over previous demonstrations in tapered and microstructured chalcogenide fibers [11,13,14]. These properties, combined with low loss (< 4 dB), ease of fabrication, and the transparency of As2Se3 from near to mid infrared regions (1 15 \mum) [20] make this device a promising building block for lasers, optical instrumentation and optical communication devices.