Bend-Free Multiarm Interferometers on Optical Chips

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel, chip-compatible multiarm interferometer design using finite modulated photonic lattices, offering scalable, compact, and planar solutions with potential for advanced classical and quantum measurements.

Contribution

It proposes a new multiport interferometer architecture on optical chips that overcomes previous limitations in footprint and arm number, using inverse design of photonic lattices.

Findings

Achieves arbitrary number of arms with reduced footprint

Predicts maximum $1/ oot{N}{ }$ sensitivity scaling

Applicable to various high and low refractive-index platforms

Abstract

Multiarm interferometers can enhance measurement precision and provide multiparameter capability to the measurement. Their realisation requires multiport beam splitters, which has been a long-standing challenge in free-space and integrated optics. Here, we propose a new type of multiport interferometers suitable for implementation on optical chips. Their prospective advantages over the standard directional-coupler architectures: an arbitrary number of arms, planar architecture and two orders of magnitude reduction in footprint, are achieved by the layout based exclusively on the finite modulated photonic lattices. The inverse design of photonic lattices is facilitated by restricting the light propagation to periodic patterns. The corresponding interferometer model predicts the maximum $1/\sqrt{N}$ sensitivity scaling with the number of arms $N$. While the presented design solutions are ubiquitous to all implementations, the advantages are discussed in both the low and high refractive-index contrast platforms. Finally, we provide an outlook on the possibilities for the interferometer applications in distributed classical and quantum measurements.