Waveguide Superlattices with Artificial Gauge Field Towards Colorless and Crosstalkless Ultrahigh-Density Photonic Integration

TL;DR

This paper introduces a waveguide superlattice design utilizing artificial gauge fields to achieve ultra-broadband, low-crosstalk, high-density photonic integration with high-speed data transmission capabilities.

Contribution

It presents a novel waveguide superlattice structure leveraging artificial gauge fields, enabling broadband crosstalk suppression and high-speed data transmission in photonic integrated circuits.

Findings

-24 dB crosstalk suppression over 500 nm bandwidth

Supports 112 Gbit/s high-speed signal transmission

Compatible with standard fabrication processes

Abstract

Dense waveguides are the basic building blocks for photonic integrated circuits (PIC). Due to the rapidly increasing scale of PIC chips, high-density integration of waveguide arrays working with low crosstalk over broadband wavelength range is highly desired. However, the sub-wavelength regime of such structures has not been adequately explored in practice. Herein, we proposed a waveguide superlattice design leveraging the artificial gauge field (AGF) mechanism, corresponding to the quantum analog of field-induced n-photon resonances in semiconductor superlattices. This approach experimentally achieves -24 dB crosstalk suppression with an ultra-broad transmission bandwidth over 500 nm for dual polarizations. The fabricated waveguide superlattices support high-speed signal transmission of 112 Gbit/s with high-fidelity signal-to-noise ratio profiles and bit error rates. This design, featuring a silica upper cladding, is compatible with standard metal back end-of-the-line (BEOL) processes. Based on such a fundamental structure that can be readily transferred to other platforms, passive and active devices over versatile platforms can be realized with a significantly shrunk on-chip footprint, thus it holds great promise for significant reduction of the power consumption and cost in PICs.