Optimizing Ultra-Long Continuous Wafer-Scale Periodic Poling in Thin-Film Lithium Niobate

Abstract

Periodically poled thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) crystals are the fundamental building block for highly-efficient quantum light sources and frequency converters. The efficiency of these devices is strongly dependent on the interaction length between the light and the nonlinear material, scaling quadratically with this parameter. Nevertheless, the fabrication of long, continuously poled areas in TFLN remains challenging, the length of continuously poled areas rarely exceeds 10 mm. In this work, we demonstrate a significant progress in this field achieving the periodic poling of continuous poled areas of 70 mm length with a 3 microns poling period and a close to 50 % duty cycle. We compare two poling electrode design approaches to fabricate long, continuous poled areas. The first approach involves the poling of a single, continuous 70 mm long electrode. The second utilize a segmented approach including the poling of more than 20 individual sections forming together a 70 mm long poling area with no stitching errors. While the continuous electrode allows for faster fabrication, the segmented approach allows to individually optimize the poling resulting in less duty cycle variation. A detailed analysis of the periodic poling results reveals that the results of both are consistent with previously reported poling outcomes for shorter devices. Thus, we demonstrate wafer-scale periodic poling exceeding chiplet-size without any loss in the periodic poling quality. Our work presents a key step towards highly-efficient, narrowbandwidth and low-pump power nonlinear optical devices.