Mitigating photorefractive effect in thin-filmlithium niobate microring resonators

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that removing dielectric cladding from thin-film lithium niobate microring resonators significantly reduces the photorefractive effect, enhancing device performance for nonlinear and quantum photonic applications.

Contribution

It introduces a simple, effective method of mitigating the photorefractive effect by removing dielectric cladding, improving the reliability of thin-film lithium niobate photonic devices.

Findings

Removing dielectric cladding reduces photorefractive effects.

Mitigation improves device performance in nonlinear applications.

Approach is applicable to integrated quantum photonics.

Abstract

Thin-film lithium niobate is an attractive integrated photonics platform due to its low optical loss and favorable optical nonlinear and electro-optic properties. However, in applications such as second harmonic generation, frequency comb generation, and microwave-to-optics conversion, the device performance is strongly impeded by the photorefractive effect inherent in thin-films. In this paper, we show that the dielectric cladding on lithium niobate microring resonator has a significant influence on the photorefractive effect. By removing the dielectric cladding layer, the photorefractive effect in lithium niobate ring resonators can be effectively mitigated. Our work presents a reliable approach to control the photorefractive effect on thin-film lithium niobate and will further advance the performance of integrated classical and quantum photonic devices based on thin-film lithium niobate.