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arXiv · 2501.01565

Implementing photonic-crystal resonator frequency combs in a photonics foundry

Haixin Liu·Ivan Dickson·Alin Antohe·Lewis G. Carpenter·Jizhao Zang·Alexa R. Carollo·Atasi Dan·Jennifer A. Black·Scott B. Papp
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Abstract

We explore an AIM Photonics silicon-nitride platform to fabricate photonic-crystal resonators for generating optical parametric oscillators (OPO) and soliton microcombs. Our approach leverages the scalability and fine feature size of silicon-nitride processing on large-scale silicon wafers to achieve low-loss, high-Q microresonators, functionalized by nano-scale photonic-crystal structures. We demonstrate intrinsic microresonator quality factor up to 1.2*10^7 with complete foundry fabrication on 300 mm silicon, a 700 nm thick silicon-nitride device layer, and inclusion of complex nanophotonics. These features enable a host of nonlinear nanophotonics sources on the platform, including OPOs, microcombs, parametric amplifiers, squeezed-light generators, and single-photon sources. By fine-tuning the photonic-crystal design parameters, we achieve broad tunability in the frequency of the OPO output, spanning a significant portion of the near-infrared. Additionally, we observe the formation of soliton frequency combs, enabled by the precise dispersion engineering of the microresonators. These results highlight the potential of widely accessible, photolithographically patterned, silicon-nitride photonics to enable wide access to and complex integration of frequency-comb sources, with applications in spectroscopy, metrology, and communications.

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Haixin Liu, Ivan Dickson, Alin Antohe, Lewis G. Carpenter, Jizhao Zang, Alexa R. Carollo, Atasi Dan, Jennifer A. Black, Scott B. Papp. 2025-01-02. Implementing photonic-crystal resonator frequency combs in a photonics foundry. https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.01565

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