Fabrication-tolerant frequency conversion in thin film lithium niobate waveguide with layer-poled modal phase matching

TL;DR

This paper introduces a layer-poled modal phase matching technique in thin film lithium niobate waveguides, offering significantly improved fabrication tolerance and efficiency for frequency conversion, facilitating scalable quantum and laser applications.

Contribution

The authors propose and validate a layer-poled modal phase matching method that is more robust to fabrication uncertainties than traditional quasi-phase matching in TFLN waveguides.

Findings

Layer-poled MPM is 5-10 times more fabrication tolerant than QPM.

Experimental results confirm higher efficiency of MPM in second harmonic generation.

Demonstrated simultaneous SHG and DFG for telecom wavelength conversion.

Abstract

Thanks to its high quadratic nonlinear susceptibilty and low propagation losses, thin film lithium niobate (TFLN) on insulator is an ideal platform for laser frequency conversion and generation of quantum states of light. Frequency conversion is usually achieved by quasi-phase matching (QPM) via electric-field poling. However, this scheme shows very high sensitivity to the dimensions of the waveguide, poling period and duty cycle, resulting in a lack of repeatability of the phase matched wavelength and efficiency, which in turn limits the spread of TFLN frequency converters in complex circuits and hinders wafer-scale production. Here we propose a layer-poled modal phase matching (MPM) that is 5 to 10 times more robust towards fabrication uncertainties and theoretically more efficient than conventional QPM. By selectively poling the bottom part of the waveguide all along its length, second harmonic is efficiently generated on a higher order waveguide's mode. We validate this approach by poling TFLN waveguides as a post-process after the fabrication in a foundry process. We perform a tolerance analysis and compare the experimental results with conventional QPM second harmonic generation process on the same waveguides. Then, we show how MPM can be exploited to obtain efficient intraband frequency conversion processes at telecom wavelengths by leveraging simultaneous second harmonic and difference frequency generation in the same waveguide.