High-dimensional Supermode Photonics Enabled by Hierarchical Supersymmetric Transformation

Abstract

Modes provide a fundamental degree of freedom for photonic information processing, yet conventional multimode waveguides exhibit non-equidistant effective-index distributions, making closely spaced modes vulnerable to intermodal crosstalk. Supermode photonics can overcome this limitation by geometrically engineering coupled waveguide arrays to realize large and equidistant effective-index spacing, but precise supermode excitation and detection remain challenging at the subwavelength scale. Here, we report a hierarchical second-order discrete supersymmetric (DSUSY) transformation method that enables high-purity excitation and extraction of arbitrary target supermodes in a compact and scalable architecture. We experimentally demonstrate six-supermode multiplexing systems on silicon-on-insulator and silicon nitride platforms. Benefiting from the large supermode index spacing and the isospectrality of DSUSY transformations, the fabricated devices exhibit low insertion losses (<2.6 dB) and intermodal crosstalk (<-11.1 dB) for all channels over a 100-nm wavelength range. A high-speed transmission experiment on the silicon device achieves an aggregate data rate of 1.2 Tbit/s, with all channel bit error rates below the 7% hard-decision forward-error-correction threshold. The method can further support polarization-insensitive architectures, enabling compact polarization-supermode hybrid multiplexing. This work provides a scalable route toward high-dimensional supermode photonics for high-capacity optical interconnects, highly parallel AI optical computing, and high-dimensional quantum information processing.