Imagine a dark lamp that is not enough to light the room. Optical amplifiers increase the brightness by increasing the number of photons emitted. Photonics researchers have created such a high-gain optical amplifier that is compact enough to be placed on a single chip. The amplifier developed, when used in optical interconnects, such as transceivers or fiber optic networks, will help to effectively increase the power of the emitted light before the emitted light is depleted by optical losses.
In addition to potentially replacing the bulky and expensive amplifiers currently used in attosecond science and ultrafast optical information processing research, the newly developed nanometer-scale amplifier also provides an important component of the optical interconnect kit , It is possible to provide regenerative amplification for optical interconnects from short distances to long distances. This work was done in collaboration with researchers at SUTD, A * STAR Data Storage Institute and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Details published in the January 4, 2017 "Nature Communications" magazine.
"We have developed an optical amplifier that can amplify 17000 times the wavelength of optical communications," said Dawn Tan, an assistant professor at Singapore's Technology and Design University who led the amplifier. "We used a proprietary platform called super-rich silicon nitride with a material composition of 70% silicon and 30% nitrogen, with the strong nonlinearity and high photon efficiency required for high-gain amplification that effectively In order to better sense this difference in scale, traditional optical parametric amplifiers can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and occupy the entire optical platform space, and the newly developed amplifier ratio A paper clip is much smaller and the cost is only a small part of the former. "
These are optical signals that propagate through a USRN waveguide, which achieves a 42.5 dB optical parametric amplification.
Delivering high gain with such small dimensions creates new opportunities in low-cost broadband spectrometers, precision manufacturing and hyperspectral imaging. The efficiency of the device can also be revealed by the cascaded four-wave mixing-high-order mixing between amplified photons and converted photons. This phenomenon also allows the amplifier to be used as a tunable wideband light source, resulting in cheaper and more efficient spectral sensing and molecular fingerprinting than existing methods.
"The low efficiency of high-nonlinearity photonic devices is overcome here by photonic device engineering, which maximizes the device's nonlinearity while maintaining a large enough band gap to eliminate the two-photon absorption at the telecom wavelength." We Believe it is by far the highest gain that CMOS chips get at telecom wavelength, "said Professor Tan.
It is possible to achieve very high gain amplification while maintaining a high level of compactness as the researchers successfully designed and implemented an amplifier with both high nonlinearity and high photon efficiency. In other platforms that are compatible with today's electronics industry processes, either the low nonlinearity or the low photon efficiency is either.
"This result demonstrates that ultra-rich silicon nitride platforms are promising for efficient non-linear optical applications, particularly in the field of CMOS photonics that utilize existing electronic infrastructure," said Dr. Doris Ng, senior scientist at the A * STAR Data Storage Institute Say.
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