Lithium niobate's use in integrated optics is somewhat hampered by the lack of a capability to create low loss waveguides with strong lateral index confinement. Thin film single crystal lithium ...niobate is a promising platform for future applications in integrated optics due to the availability of a strong electro-optic effect in this material coupled with the possibility of strong vertical index confinement. However, sidewalls of etched waveguides are typically rough in most etching procedures, exacerbating propagation losses. In this paper, we propose a fabrication method that creates significantly smoother ridge waveguides. This involves argon ion milling and subsequent gas clustered ion beam smoothening. We have fabricated and characterized ultra-low loss waveguides with this technique, with propagation losses as low as 0.3 dB/cm at 1.55 µm.
Light‐driven plasmonic color filters are demonstrated by integrating gold annular aperture arrays with photoresponsive liquid crystals (LCs). Upon photoirradiation, a nematic−isotropic phase ...transition of the LCs arises from the trans–cis photoisomerization of photochromic LCs. As a consequence, the effective refractive index experienced by the impinging light changes, modulating the transmission intensity.
Much attention has been recently focused on realizing, by chemical treatment, an artificial superhydrophobic surface with elevated roughness in order to achieve both self cleaning and antireflective ...effects because superhydrophobic surface with surface functionalization is believed to be effective for the self cleaning effect, mimicking a lotus leaf. Various hydrophobic, hydrophilic, superhydrophobic, and superhydrophilic glasses are evaluated by monitoring the variation of water contact angle (CA), optical transmittance, and photovoltaic performance under outdoor conditions for 12 weeks. Our results show a nanopatterned superhydrophilic glass without surface chemical treatment exhibits more efficient self cleaning and antireflective effects, leading to only 1.39% of drop of solar cell efficiency during an outdoor test for 12 weeks, while the solar cells with bare glass packaging and fluorinated superhydrophobic packaging show 7.79% and 2.62% of efficiency drop, respectively.
► Various glass surfaces are tested for self cleaning and antireflective properties. ► We examine the contact angle, optical transmittance, and photovoltaic performance. ► Directly patterned superhydrophilic glass shows the best performance after 12 weeks. ► Surface chemical treatment process is unnecessary.
Metasurfaces as artificially nanostructured interfaces hold significant potential for multi-functionality, which may play a pivotal role in the next-generation compact nano-devices. The majority of ...multi-tasked metasurfaces encode or encrypt multi-information either into the carefully tailored metasurfaces or in pre-set complex incident beam arrays. Here, we propose and demonstrate a multi-momentum transformation metasurface (i.e., meta-transformer), by fully synergizing intrinsic properties of light, e.g., orbital angular momentum (OAM) and linear momentum (LM), with a fixed phase profile imparted by a metasurface. The OAM meta-transformer reconstructs different topologically charged beams into on-axis distinct patterns in the same plane. The LM meta-transformer converts red, green and blue illuminations to the on-axis images of "R", "G" and "B" as well as vivid color holograms, respectively. Thanks to the infinite states of light-metasurface phase combinations, such ultra-compact meta-transformer has potential in information storage, nanophotonics, optical integration and optical encryption.
We propose and demonstrate a type of high-performance transverse magnetic (TM) multimode interferometer (MMI) in Z-cut thin film lithium niobate (TFLN). Both 1 × 2 and 4 × 4 MMI designs are ...demonstrated. Simulation results show that the insertion losses (ILs) are nominally about 0.157 and 0.297 dB for the 1 × 2 and 4 × 4 MMI, respectively, with wide fabrication tolerances. Based on the designed structure, the MMIs are fabricated using an argon based induced coupled plasma (ICP) etching method in Z-cut TFLN. The measured ILs are 0.268 and 0.63 dB for these two kinds of devices. The presented TM mode MMI featuring compact size and low loss can be used for both multifunctional devices and on-chip integrated circuits on a Z-cut TFLN platform.
Lithium niobate (LN) has experienced significant developments during past decades due to its versatile properties, especially its large electro-optic (EO) coefficient. For example, bulk LN-based ...modulators with high speeds and a superior linearity are widely used in typical fiber-optic communication systems. However, with ever-increasing demands for signal transmission capacity, the high power and large size of bulk LN-based devices pose great challenges, especially when one of its counterparts, integrated silicon photonics, has experienced dramatic developments in recent decades. Not long ago, high-quality thin-film LN on insulator (LNOI) became commercially available, which has paved the way for integrated LN photonics and opened a hot research area of LN photonics devices. LNOI allows a large refractive index contrast, thus light can be confined within a more compact structure. Together with other properties of LN, such as nonlinear/acousto-optic/pyroelectric effects, various kinds of high-performance integrated LN devices can be demonstrated. A comprehensive summary of advances in LN photonics is provided. As LN photonics has experienced several decades of development, our review includes some of the typical bulk LN devices as well as recently developed thin film LN devices. In this way, readers may be inspired by a complete picture of the evolution of this technology. We first introduce the basic material properties of LN and several key processing technologies for fabricating photonics devices. After that, various kinds of functional devices based on different effects are summarized. Finally, we give a short summary and perspective of LN photonics. We hope this review can give readers more insight into recent advances in LN photonics and contribute to the further development of LN related research.
We propose and demonstrate a type of highly efficient tunable Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) in Z-cut lithium niobate thin film (TFLN) based on the thermo-optical effect. By placing the electrode ...directly above the TFLN waveguide, a more uniform and higher heat distribution was obtained, compared with the conventional horizontal structure. Both the principle and design strategies of the proposed scheme are described. The process flow of the device fabrication is demonstrated in Z-cut TFLN. The measured static results accord well with the simulations. About 0.121 nm/V tuning efficiency is observed, which is nearly double the tuning efficiency based on the electro-optic effect, and may prove useful when high switching speed is not the primary consideration. The presented thermo-optic tuning scheme can be extended to other scenarios easily and may satisfy many different application requirements in integrated lithium niobate photonics (LNPs).
We propose and demonstrate a Mach-Zehnder modulator in Z-cut lithium niobate thin film (LNTF) with a vertical electric field structure. By placing the metal electrodes on top and bottom of the ...waveguide rather than the usual lateral configuration, the electric field is fully overlapping the optical field. Such a configuration reduces the critical requirement of electrode alignment as needed in X/Y-cut LN based devices. Both the simulation and process details to realize the proposed device are demonstrated. The measured static performance accords well with the simulations. Additionally, we developed a new method to accurately characterize the dynamic performance of the Z-cut LNTF modulator, and the measured tuning efficiency is around 8.84 pm/V. Our proposed device validates the feasibility of integrated Z-cut LNTF based modulators, and will likely extend the research area of integrated lithium niobate photonics.
We analyzed the dry etching of perovskite oxides using argon-based inductively coupled plasmas (ICP) for photonics applications. Various chamber conditions and their effects on etching rates have ...been demonstrated based on Z-cut lithium niobate (LN). The measured results are predictable and repeatable and can be applied to other perovskite oxides, such as X-cut LN and barium titanium oxide (BTO). The surface roughness is better for both etched LN and BTO compared with their as-deposited counterparts as confirmed by atomic force microscopy (AFM). Both the energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) methods have been used for surface chemical component comparisons, qualitative and quantitative, and no obvious surface state changes are observed according to the measured results. An optical waveguide fabricated with the optimized argon-based ICP etching was measured to have -3.7 dB/cm loss near 1550 nm wavelength for Z-cut LN, which validates this kind of method for perovskite oxides etching in photonics applications.
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