An erbium-doped waveguide amplifier on thin film lithium niobate with an output power exceeding 100 mW

TL;DR

This paper reports a high-power erbium-doped waveguide amplifier on thin film lithium niobate, achieving over 100 mW output power with integrated mode conversion, enabling advanced on-chip laser and amplifier applications.

Contribution

The work introduces a large mode area waveguide design with segmented structures and tapers for high-power on-chip amplification on thin film lithium niobate.

Findings

Maximum output power of 113 mW on-chip

Gain of 16 dB achieved

Single-mode propagation maintained at bends

Abstract

We demonstrate high-power thin film lithium niobate (TFLN) erbium-doped waveguide amplifier (EDWA) with a maximum on-chip output power of 113 mW and a gain of 16 dB. The on-chip integrated EDWA is composed of large mode area (LMA) waveguide structures with a total length of 7 cm and a footprint of 1x1 cm2. Particularly, we connect segmented LMA waveguides with waveguide tapers to achieve on-chip mode conversion which maintains single-mode propagation all over the EDWA even at the waveguide bends. The design leads to significant increase of the amplified signal power by orders of magnitude and will open an avenue for applications such as on-chip high-power lasers and amplifiers system.