Hybrid-mode-family Kerr optical parametric oscillation for robust coherent light generation on chip

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hybrid-mode-family Kerr optical parametric oscillation (hOPO) on chip, which uses different transverse mode families for pump, signal, and idler to achieve robust, efficient, and scalable coherent light generation across visible and infrared spectra.

Contribution

It proposes and demonstrates a novel hybrid-mode-family approach for Kerr OPO that enhances robustness against dispersion variations and device parameters, improving scalability and performance.

Findings

Achieved milliwatt-level output power with 8% efficiency.

Demonstrated robustness to dispersion, geometry, pump frequency, and temperature.

Showcased potential for on-chip visible and infrared light sources.

Abstract

Optical parametric oscillation (OPO) using the third-order nonlinearity ($\chi^{(3)}$) in integrated photonics platforms is an emerging approach for coherent light generation, and has shown great promise in achieving broad spectral coverage with small device footprints and at low pump powers. However, current $\chi^{(3)}$ nanophotonic OPO devices use pump, signal, and idler modes of the same transverse spatial mode family. As a result, such single-mode-family OPO (sOPO) is inherently sensitive in dispersion and can be challenging to scalably fabricate and implement. In this work, we propose to use different families of transverse spatial modes for pump, signal, and idler, which we term as hybrid-mode-family OPO (hOPO). We demonstrate its unprecedented robustness in dispersion versus device geometry, pump frequency, and temperature. Moreover, we show the capability of the hOPO scheme to generate a few milliwatts of output signal power with a power conversion efficiency of approximately 8 $\%$ and without competitive processes. The hOPO scheme is an important counterpoint to existing sOPO approaches, and is particularly promising as a robust method to generate coherent on-chip visible and infrared light sources.