Artificial gauge field enabled low-crosstalk, broadband, half-wavelength-pitched waveguide arrays

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel artificial gauge field technique to create dense, low-crosstalk, broadband waveguide arrays with half-wavelength pitch, enabling high-density integrated photonics with improved routing and minimal loss.

Contribution

The authors demonstrate a new method leveraging artificial gauge fields to achieve dense waveguide arrays with suppressed crosstalk and broadband operation in silicon photonics.

Findings

-30dB crosstalk suppression from 1480nm to 1550nm

Negligible insertion loss for 90-degree bends

Enables high-density, flexible routing in photonic circuits

Abstract

Dense waveguide arrays with half-wavelength-pitch, low-crosstalk, broadband, and flexible routing capability are essential for integrated photonics. However, achieving such performance is challenging due to the relatively weaker confinement of dielectric waveguides and the increased interactions among densely packed waveguides. Here, leveraging the artificial gauge field mechanism, we demonstrate half-wavelength-pitched dense waveguide arrays, consisting of 64 waveguides, in silicon with -30dB crosstalk suppression from 1480nm to 1550nm. The waveguide array features negligible insertion loss for 90-degree bending. Our approach enables flexibly routing a large-scale dense waveguide array that significantly reduces on-chip estate, leading to a high-density photonic integrated circuit, and may open up opportunities for important device performance improvement, such as half-wavelength-pitch OPA and ultra-dense space-division multiplexing