Ultra-low loss piezo-optomechanical low-confinement silicon nitride platform for visible wavelength quantum photonic circuits

TL;DR

This paper presents a CMOS-fabricated, ultra-low loss silicon nitride platform with piezo-optomechanical actuation at visible wavelengths, enabling scalable, high-performance active photonic circuits for quantum computing.

Contribution

It introduces a low-confinement silicon nitride platform combining ultra-low loss and piezo-optomechanical actuation, overcoming previous limitations for scalable visible-wavelength quantum photonic circuits.

Findings

Propagation loss of 0.026 dB/cm at 780 nm

Modulation bandwidths in the MHz range

Phase shifter voltage-length product of 2.8 V·m

Abstract

The stringent demands of photonic quantum computing protocols motivate photonic integrated circuit (PIC) platforms with passive optical properties such as extremely low losses and correspondingly large circuit depths, as well as active optical properties such as high reconfiguration rates, low power dissipation, and minimal crosstalk. At the same time, many quantum photonic resource state generators, such as single-photon sources and quantum memories, require operation in the visible wavelength range. These requirements make the passive optical properties of CMOS-fabricated, ultralow-loss, low-confinement silicon nitride waveguides especially attractive. However, the conventional active properties of these systems based on thermo-optic modulation are plagued by high levels of crosstalk, slow modulation rates, and high power dissipation. Although there have been recent demonstrations of CMOS-fabricated, visible wavelength, piezo-optomechanical PICs that solve the above challenges associated with implementing active functionality, these have made use of high-confinement waveguides with currently demonstrated losses of order $0.3$-$1~\mathrm{dB/cm}$, precluding circuit depths required for scalable quantum algorithms. Here, we demonstrate that combining piezo-optomechanical actuation with a low-confinement, ultra-low loss silicon nitride platform addresses the scalability challenge while enabling high-performance active functionality at visible wavelengths. This platform achieves a propagation loss $0.026~\mathrm{dB/cm}$ at $780~\mathrm{nm}$, modulation bandwidths in the MHz range, and a phase shifter voltage-length product ($V_\pi L$) of approximately $2.8~\mathrm{\mathrm{V}\cdot\mathrm{m}}$ and negligible hysteresis. We further demonstrate reconfigurable Mach-Zehnder interferometers based on spiral phase shifters with 0.63 dB loss per phase shifter.