1D self-healing beams in integrated silicon photonics

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the generation of 1D Airy beams on a silicon photonic chip, showcasing their self-healing and non-diffracting properties in an integrated platform, which could advance on-chip optical routing and micromanipulation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel on-chip method to generate 1D Airy beams using ultra-compact meta-optics, preserving their properties in an integrated environment.

Findings

Successfully generated 1D Airy beams on silicon chip

Demonstrated self-healing property of on-chip beams

Achieved ultra-compact beam generation (3x16 microns)

Abstract

Since the first experimental observation of optical Airy beams, various applications ranging from particle and cell micromanipulation to laser micromachining have exploited their non-diffracting and accelerating properties. The later discovery that Airy beams can self-heal after being blocked by an obstacle further proved their robustness to propagate under scattering and disordered environment. Here, we report the generation of Airy beams on an integrated silicon photonic chip and demonstrate that the on-chip 1D Airy beams preserve the same properties as the 2D beams. The 1D meta-optics used to create the Airy beam has the size of only 3 by 16 microns, at least three orders of magnitude smaller than the conventional optic. The on-chip self-healing beams demonstrated here could potentially enable diffraction-free light routing for on-chip optical networks and high-precision micromanipulation of bio-molecules on an integrated photonic chip.