High-Q photonic crystal Fabry-Perot micro-resonator in thin-film lithium niobate

TL;DR

This paper introduces high-Q photonic crystal Fabry-Perot micro-resonators in thin-film lithium niobate, offering improved spectral tunability, confinement, and scalability for integrated nonlinear and quantum photonics.

Contribution

The work demonstrates a novel photonic crystal Fabry-Perot micro-resonator design in TFLN with high Q-factors and tunable properties, overcoming limitations of conventional resonators.

Findings

Achieved intrinsic Q factors up to 1.4 million.

Controlled FSR and coupling via cavity and PhC design.

Tunable photonic bandgap across S-, C-, and L-bands.

Abstract

Thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) has emerged as a powerful platform for integrated nonlinear and quantum photonics, owing to its strong optical nonlinearities, wide transparency window, and electro- and piezo-optic properties. However, conventional traveling-wave resonators, such as micro-rings, disks, and racetracks, suffer from curvature-dependent group dispersion and losses, limited spectral tunability, and parasitic nonlinearities, which constrain their performance, scalability, and operational stability in nonlinear photonic circuits. Here, we present photonic crystal (PhC) Fabry-Perot (FP) micro-resonators in TFLN that address these limitations. The device features a one-dimensional straight cavity bounded by PhC reflectors and supports well-confined standing-wave resonant modes within an engineered photonic bandgap. We achieve intrinsic quality (Q) factors of up to 1.4e6 and demonstrate that both the free spectral range (FSR) and coupling strength can be consistently controlled via cavity length and PhC coupler design, respectively. The photonic bandgap is tunable across the S-, C-, and L-bands without degradation of resonator performance. Spectral confinement of high-Q resonant modes is expected to mitigate parasitic nonlinearities, such as Raman scattering. These advances, together with the one-dimensional geometry, establish PhC FP micro-resonators as compact and scalable building blocks for high-density photonic integrated circuits targeting next-generation nonlinear and quantum applications.