Extreme Nonlinear Photonics on Chip

Since the birth of nonlinear optics, researchers have continually focused on developing efficient nonlinear optical devices that require low optical powers. Silicon nanophotonics has emerged as a highly promising platform for such devices and for enabling massively parallel, integrated optical and electronic devices on a single chip. The key feature for nonlinear photonics in Silicon is the strong light confinement that enables both a high effective nonlinearity and tuning of the dispersion, which is essential for phase matching of parametric nonlinear optical processes such as four-wave-mixing (FWM). Using modest continuous-wave powers < 100 mW, we demonstrate a wide range of nonlinear optical devices for ultrahigh bandwidth all-optical processing, chip-based all-optical clocks, and the generation of very high repetition rate femtosecond pulse sources.