from a recent abstract, Thin-film LN on insulator has recently emerged as a promising material platform to shrink the optical mode volume and boost the electro-optic efficiency [20]. While progress has been made towards chip-scale LN devices [20–33], realization of a monolithic LN nanophotonic circuit that can address the challenges of high-speed modern telecommunication remains challenging. This is partly due to the difficulty in LN dry etching which typically results in optical waveguides with high optical loss. For this reason, hybrid platforms have been pursued as an alternative, where an easy-to-etch material (e.g. Si and SiN) is used as a device layer and is bonded to non-etched thin LN films [22–26]. While these heterogeneous platforms have shown promising results, they may ultimately be limited by performance trade-off between electro-optic bandwidth, modulation efficiency, optical confinement and operating wavelength.
start-up company, HyperLight, we'll need to follow their developments!
In a particularly intriguing note, the study concludes that the device’s advantages of low optical losses, good electro-optical response, integration and scalability could combine to help create “a new generation of active integrated optoelectronic circuits that can be reconfigured on a picosecond timescale using attojoules of electrical energy.” The team believes those circuits could find use in microwave photonics, quantum networks, topological photonic circuits and photonic neural networks, among other areas.
The prospects have not been lost on Harvard’s Office of Technology Development—which, with Loncar’s lab, has created a start-up company, HyperLight, to “commercialize a portfolio of foundational intellectual property related to this work.”
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