Milliwatt-threshold visible-telecom optical parametric oscillation using silicon nanophotonics

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a silicon nanophotonic device that generates visible light from an infrared pump at a record low threshold power of around 1 mW, enabling efficient, stable, and scalable on-chip visible light sources for spectroscopy and metrology.

Contribution

It introduces a widely-separated optical parametric oscillator in silicon nanophotonics with a threshold power over 50 times lower than previous works, enabling direct visible light generation without amplifiers.

Findings

Threshold power of 0.9 mW for visible-telecom OPO

Operates at 50x lower power than previous infrared OPOs

Device design allows generation of 780 nm and 1500 nm light

Abstract

The on-chip creation of coherent light at visible wavelengths is crucial to field-level deployment of spectroscopy and metrology systems. Although on-chip lasers have been implemented in specific cases, a general solution that is not restricted by limitations of specific gain media has not been reported. Here, we propose creating visible light from an infrared pump by widely-separated optical parametric oscillation (OPO) using silicon nanophotonics. The OPO creates signal and idler light in the 700 nm and 1300 nm bands, respectively, with a 900 nm pump. It operates at a threshold power of (0.9 +/- 0.1) mW, over 50x smaller than other widely-separated microcavity OPO works, which have only been reported in the infrared. This low threshold enables direct pumping without need of an intermediate optical amplifier. We further show how the device design can be modified to generate 780 nm and 1500 nm light with a similar power efficiency. Our nanophotonic OPO shows distinct advantages in power efficiency, operation stability, and device scalability, and is a major advance towards flexible on-chip generation of coherent visible light.