Stimulated and spontaneous four-wave mixing in silicon-on-insulator coupled photonic wire nano-cavities

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates enhanced four-wave mixing in silicon-on-insulator photonic wire nano-cavities, achieving high efficiency and pump rejection, advancing integrated quantum photonics.

Contribution

It introduces coupled photonic crystal nano-cavities with self-filtering design for improved four-wave mixing efficiency in silicon photonics.

Findings

Pump rejection is nearly two orders of magnitude.

Signal and idler photon generation efficiency is hundred times higher.

The structure enables both stimulated and spontaneous four-wave mixing.

Abstract

We report on four-wave mixing in coupled photonic crystal nano-cavities on a silicon-on-insulator platform. Three photonic wire cavities are side-coupled to obtain three modes equally separated in energy. The structure is designed to be self-filtering, and we show that the pump is rejected by almost two orders of magnitudes. We study both the stimulated and the spontaneous four-wave mixing processes: owing to the small modal volume, we find that signal and idler photons are generated with a hundred-fold increase in efficiency as compared to silicon micro-ring resonators.