Efficient and Adaptive Reconfiguration of Light Structure in Optical Fibers with Programmable Silicon Photonics

TL;DR

This paper presents a programmable silicon photonic chip that can adaptively reconfigure the spatial and polarization structure of light at the end of an optical fiber, overcoming challenges posed by unknown transmission matrices and fiber variations.

Contribution

It introduces a scalable, CMOS-compatible photonic processor capable of precise, adaptive control of light structure in fibers without prior system knowledge.

Findings

High-quality beam structures achieved experimentally

Efficient generation with chip-to-fiber emitter demonstrated

Adaptive reconfiguration without prior fiber information

Abstract

The demand for structured light with a reconfigurable spatial and polarization distribution has been increasing across a wide range of fundamental and advanced photonics applications, including microscopy, imaging, sensing, communications, and quantum information processing. Nevertheless, the unique challenge in manipulating light structure after optical fiber transmission is the necessity to dynamically address the inherent unknown fiber transmission matrix, which can be affected by factors like variations in the fiber stress and inter-modal coupling. In this study, we demonstrated that the beam structure at the fiber end including its spatial and polarization distribution can be precisely and adaptively reconfigured by a programmable silicon photonic processor, without prior knowledge of the optical fiber systems and their changes in the transmission matrices. Our demonstrated photonic chip can generate and control the full set of spatial and polarization modes or their superposition in a two-mode few-mode optical fiber. High-quality beam structures can be obtained in experiments. In addition, efficient generation is achieved by our proposed chip-to-fiber emitter while using a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor compatible fabrication technology. Our findings present a scalable pathway towards achieving a portable and reliable system capable of achieving precise control, efficient emission, and adaptive reconfiguration for structured light in optical fibers.