Canonical Four-Wave-Mixing in Photonic Crystal Resonators: tuning, tolerances and scaling

TL;DR

This paper investigates four-wave-mixing in photonic crystal resonators, analyzing design, fabrication tolerances, and scaling laws, with experimental validation of threshold power and photon lifetime effects.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive comparison of resonator geometries, assesses robustness against fabrication tolerances, and explores the scaling of performance parameters.

Findings

Threshold pump power is approximately 40 μW.

A minimum cavity photon lifetime is necessary for oscillation.

Performance follows theoretical scaling laws.

Abstract

Canonical Four-Wave-Mixing occurs in a resonator with only the required number of modes, thereby inhibiting competing parametric processes. The properties of the recently introduced photonic crystal parametric oscillator, Marty et al. Nat. Photonics, 15, 53 (2021), are discussed extensively. We compare the bichromatic design with other geometries of photonic crystal resonators. Based on a statistical study over more than 100 resonators and 10 parametric oscillators, robustness against fabrication tolerances is assessed, performances are evaluated in terms of average values and their dispersion, and the dependence on the main parameters is shown to follow the theoretical scaling. The lowest pump power at threshold is $\approx$ 40 $\mu$W and we show the existence of a minimum value of the cavity photon lifetime as a condition for parametric oscillation, which is related to three photon absorption.