arXiv subjects

Daoxin Dai

Publications and source records attributed to Daoxin Dai.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Ultrafast and long-term stability Integrated Pockels laser with thin-film PZT

Integrated tunable lasers are central to coherent communications, wavelength-routed optical interconnects, spectroscopy and frequency-modulated continuous-wave LiDAR, yet chip-scale sources rarely combine broad wavelength coverage, nanosecond switching, high spectral purity and stable high-power operation. Here we demonstrate a frequency-agile hybrid external-cavity laser enabled by the Pockels effect in thin-film lead zirconate titanate (PZT). The strong linear electro-optic response of PZT provides direct, non-thermal tuning of compact microring resonators with a wavelength-tuning efficiency of 17 pm/V. In contrast to conventional anisotropic Pockels materials, the near-isotropic in-plane electro-optic behaviour of thin-film PZT relaxes crystal-axis layout constraints, allowing efficient Vernier wavelength selection in compact ring cavities. The PZT resonators also show no measurable photorefractive resonance distortion and no resolvable DC-bias drift during operation, preserving stable wavelength-selective feedback. The demonstrated laser achieves an 82 nm tuning range, a 5 mW fiber-coupled output power, a side-mode suppression ratio (SMSR) exceeding 56.7 dB, and a wavelength-switching time of 5.5 ns. These results establish thin-film PZT photonics as a powerful electro-optic platform for compact, high-power, and frequency-agile integrated laser sources.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2026

Hybrid-plasticity Photonic Synapses Enabling Hardware-Level Neural Reuse

Biological intelligence is distinguished by neural reuse, the capacity to preserve established learning memory while repurposing it for new tasks and dynamic environments. Bringing this capability to photonic hardware requires hybrid plasticity, namely the coexistence of long-term synaptic plasticity for persistent weight storage and short-term synaptic plasticity for rapid, reversible adaptation within a single synaptic element; however, current photonic architectures lack such a unified mechanism. Here, we demonstrate a hybrid-plasticity photonic synapse on thin-film lead zirconate titanate (PZT) that couples non-volatile and volatile modes to enable hardware-level neural reuse. Crucially, high-speed refresh operations can be superimposed without perturbing the stored weight. Such a neural-reuse framework yields a convergence speedup of over 20-fold and reduces the weight updates by approximately 30-fold compared with random initialization. These results establish hybrid-plasticity photonic synapses as a pathway toward on-chip learning systems that are both memory-preserving and rapidly adaptable.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2026

Novel High-Scalability Architecture for Photonic Deep Learning

Photonic computing promises ultrafast and energy-efficient artificial intelligence. However, existing photonic neural networks (PNNs) remain functionally shallow and difficult to scale. Here we establish a theory-guided framework showing that power stability and complex-field correlation are the fundamental prerequisites for scalable, coherent PNNs. Building on these macroscopic principles, we introduce the Coherent, Compensated and Cross-connected (C3) unit - an architecture that integrates coherent nonlinearity, active loss compensation and native optical residual connectivity. Implemented on a silicon-on-insulator platform, the C3 unit provides reconfigurable activation functions and dynamic energy stabilization without external amplification. We validate this framework using a width-constrained spiral benchmark, in which the C3 unit substantially improves parameter utilization and power robustness relative to incoherent nonlinearities. In a high-complexity 1,623-class recognition task, our C3-enabled coherent residual network (CoP-ResNet) achieves a top-1 accuracy of 77.92%, whereas non-residual architectures fail to converge. Together, these results offer a physically grounded, theory-guided pathway toward greater optical processing depth, laying the foundation for next-generation, large-scale photonic computing architectures.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2025

Pockels effect induced strong Kerr nonlinearity in a lithium niobate waveguide

The utilization of Kerr nonlinearity in lithium niobate has been extensively investigated over the years. Nevertheless, the practical implementation of Kerr nonlinearity in waveguides has been constrained by the material's inherently low third-order nonlinear coefficients. Here, we present a significant advancement by demonstrating Pockels effect-induced strong Kerr nonlinearity in a periodically poled thin-film lithium niobate waveguide. Both effective four-wave mixing (FWM) and cascaded effective FWM processes are experimentally observed. The induced FWM process achieves a remarkable maximum output power of -8.5 dBm, spanning a wavelength spectrum of over 116.8 nm. Analysis reveals that the induced effective Kerr nonlinearity exhibits a substantial effective nonlinear refractive index as $2.9\times 10^{-15} m^{2}W^{-1}$, corresponding to an effective nonlinear refractive index enhancement factor of $1.6\times 10^{4}$ relative to the intrinsic value. Moreover, a wavelength-converting experiment demonstrates a flat optic-to-optic response over a broadband radiofrequency spectrum, confirming that signal integrity is well preserved after on-chip effective FWM conversion. Therefore, the demonstrated efficient and broadband Pockels effect induced effective Kerr nonlinearity paves the way for novel applications in diverse fields, including spectroscopy, parametric amplification, quantum correlation studies, and wavelength conversion technologies.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2024

Ultra-low-loss slow-light thin-film lithium-niobate optical modulator

Electro-optic modulators for next-generation optical interconnects require low loss-efficiency products, compact footprints, high modulation efficiency, broad bandwidths, and low losses. Here we propose and demonstrate a low-loss high-efficiency thin-film lithium-niobate Mach Zehnder modulator enabled by a novel ultralow-loss slow-light structure based on apodized gratings in cascade. The present loss-engineered slow-light structure achieves excess losses as low as 0.6 dB/mm experimentally, which is tens of times lower than conventional slow-light structures, and a high modulation bandwidth up to 320GHz in theory is achieved with optimally-designed capacitively-loaded traveling-wave electrodes. Experimentally, the fabricated slow-light modulator with a 2.8-mm-long modulation region has an ultra-low loss-efficiency product of 7.4 VdB and a flat electro-optic response up to 67 GHz, enabling 100-Gbps on-off keying with high ERs of 4.5 dB at a low driving voltage of 2Vpp, while 200-Gbps PAM4 and 150-Gbps PAM8 signals are also generated to show great promise for advanced modulation formats. In particular, it has also achieved the highest figure-of-merit(FOM) of 182 for high-speed optical modulation , including the bit rate, the extinction ratio normalized with respective to Vpp, the modulation efficiency. The outstanding performance of the present apodized-grating-based slow-light modulator shows great potential and paves the way for developing high-speed optical interconnects for both data-centers and high-performance computing systems.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2024

All-On-chip Reconfigurable Structured Light Generator

Structured light carrying angular momentum, such as spin angular momentum (SAM) and orbital angular momentum (OAM), has been at the core of new science and applications, driving the need for compact on-chip sources. While many static on-chip solutions have been demonstrated, as well as on-chip sources of free-space modes, no architecture that is fully reconfigurable in all angular momentum states and all on-chip has so far been possible. Here we report the first all-on-chip structured light generator for the creation of both scalar and vectorial angular momentum beams, facilitated through a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) chip with a silica mode multiplexer (silica chip). We selectively stimulate six linearly-polarized (LP) modes of the silica multimode bus waveguide, precisely controlling the modal powers and phases with the SOI chip. This allows us to tailor arbitrary superpositions of the mode set thus synthesizing common cylindrical vector vortex beams as well as OAM beams of controlled spin and topological charge. Our compact structured light generator exhibits high switching speed and operates across the telecom band, paving the way for applications such as optical communication and integrated quantum technologies.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2024

PZT Optical Memristors

Optical memristors represent a monumental leap in the fusion of photonics and electronics, heralding a new era of applications from neuromorphic computing to artificial intelligence. However, current technologies are hindered by complex fabrication, limited endurance, high optical loss or low modulation depth. For the first time, we reveal optical non-volatility in thin-film Lead Zirconate Titanate (PZT) by electrically manipulating the ferroelectric domains to control the refractive index, providing a brand-new routine for optical memristors. The developed PZT optical memristors offer unprecedented advantages more than exceptional performance metrics like low loss of <2 dB/cm, high precision exceeding 6-bits, large modulation depth with an index change as large as 4.6x10-3. Additionally, these devices offer impressive stability, maintaining minimal wavelength variation for over three weeks and enduring more than 10,000 cycles, and require a mere 0.8 pJ of energy for non-volatile operation. The wafer-scale sol-gel fabrication process also ensures compatible with standardized mass fabrication processes and high scalability for photonic integration. Specially, these devices also demonstrate unique functional duality: setting above a threshold voltage enables non-volatile behaviors, below this threshold allows volatile high-speed optical modulation. This marks the first-ever optical memristor capable of performing high-speed (48 Gbps) and energy-efficient (450 fJ/bit) signal processing and non-volatile retention on a single platform, and is also the inaugural demonstration of scalable functional systems. The PZT optical memristors developed here facilitate the realization of novel paradigms for high-speed and energy-efficient optical interconnects, programmable PICs, quantum computing, neural networks, in-memory computing and brain-like architecture.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2024

Active control of excitonic strong coupling and electroluminescence in electrically driven plasmonic nanocavities

Enhancement and active control of light-matter interactions at the atomic scale is important for developing next-generation nanophotonic and quantum optical devices. Here, we demonstrate electric control of both excitonic strong coupling and electroluminescence by integrating semiconductor monolayers into a nanometer gap of electrically driven nanocube-on-mirror plasmonic nanocavities. Particularly, in a strongly-coupled system of nanocavity plasmons and WSe2 excitons, the ultra-strong electric field generated in the nanocavity gap enables a reversible modulation of the Rabi splitting between ~102 and 80 meV with a bias below 2.5 V. In the quantum tunnelling regime, by injecting carriers into a nanocavity-integrated WS2 monolayer, bias-controlled spectrally tunable electroluminescence from charged or neutral excitons is achieved with an external quantum efficiency reaching ~3.5%. These results underline practical approaches to electric control of atomic-scale light-matter interactions for applications including nanoscale light sources, ultrafast electro-optic modulation, quantum information processing and sensing.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2024

Nonvolatile Silicon Photonic MEMS Switch Based on Centrally-Clamped Stepped Bistable Mechanical Beams

High-performance photonic switches are essential for large-scale optical routing for AI large models and Internet of things. Realizing nonvolatility can further reduce power consumption and expand application scenarios. We propose a nonvolatile 2*2 silicon photonic micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) switch compatible with standard silicon photonic foundry processes. The switch employs electrostatic comb actuator to change the air gap of the compact horizontal adiabatic coupler and achieves nonvolatility with centrally-clamped stepped bistable mechanical beams. The photonic switch features a 10s us-scale switching speed and a 10s fJ-scale simulated switching energy within a 100*100 um2 footprint, with <=12 V driving voltages. This 2*2 switch can be used in a variety of topologies for large-scale photonic switches, and its nonvolatility can potentially support future photonic FPGA designs.

physics.app-ph↗

arXiv2024

Hybrid thin-film lithium niobate micro-ring acousto-optic modulator for microwave-to-optical conversion

Highly efficient acousto-optic modulation plays a vital role in the microwave-to-optical conversion. Herein, we demonstrate a hybrid thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) racetrack micro-ring acousto-optic modulator (AOM) implemented with low-loss chalcogenide (ChG) waveguide. By engineering the electrode configuration of the interdigital transducer, the double-arm micro-ring acousto-optic modulation is experimentally confirmed in nonsuspended ChG loaded TFLN waveguide platform. Varying the position of blue-detuned bias point, the half-wave-voltage-length product VpaiL of the hybrid TFLN micro-ring AOM is as small as 9 mVcm. Accordingly, the acousto-optic coupling strength is estimated to be 0.48 Hz s1/2 at acoustic frequency of 0.84 GHz. By analyzing the generation of phonon number from the piezoelectric transducer, the microwave-to-optical conversion efficiency is calculated to be 0.05%, approximately one order of magnitude larger than that of the state-of-the-art suspended counterpart. Efficient microwave-to-optical conversion thus provides new opportunities for low-power-consumption quantum information transduction using the TFLN-ChG hybrid piezo-optomechanical devices.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2024

Four-Channel WDM Graphene Optical Receiver

Silicon photonics with the advantages of low power consumption, low cost, and high yield is a crucial technology for facilitating high-capacity optical communications and interconnects. The graphene photodetectors (GPDs) featuring broadband operation, high speed, and low integration cost can be good additions to the conventional SiGe photodetectors, supporting silicon-integrated on-chip photodetection in new wavelength bands beyond 1.6 microns (e.g., U-band and 2 microns). Here we realize a silicon-integrated four-channel wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) optical receiver based on a micro-ring resonator (MRR) array and four p-n homojunction GPDs. These GPDs based on the photo-thermoelectric (PTE) effect operating under zero (current) bias exhibit responsivities of about 1.1 V/W and flat frequency responses up to 67 GHz which is set-up limited. The GPDs show good consistence benefiting from the compact active region array (0.006 mm^2) covered by a single mechanically exfoliated hBN/graphene/hBN stack. Moreover, the WDM graphene optical receiver realized the 4 x 16 Gbps non-return to zero (NRZ) optical signal transmission. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first GPD-array-based optical receiver using high-quality mechanically exfoliated graphene and edge graphene-metal conduct with low resistance. Apparently, our design is also compatible with CVD-grown graphene, which can also result in a good consistence of the GPDs. This work shed light on the large-scale integration of GPDs with high consistency and uniformity, enabling the application of high-quality mechanically exfoliated graphene, and promoting the development of the graphene photonic integrated circuits.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2023

Silicon photonic MEMS switches based on split waveguide crossings

The continuous push for high-performance photonic switches is one of the most crucial premises for the sustainable scaling of programmable and reconfigurable photonic circuits for a wide spectrum of applications. Conventional optical switches rely on the perturbative mechanisms of mode coupling or mode interference, resulting in inherent bottlenecks in their switching performance concerning size, power consumption and bandwidth. Here we propose and realize a silicon photonic 2x2 elementary switch based on a split waveguide crossing (SWX) consisting of two halves. The propagation direction of the incident light is manipulated to implement the OFF/ON states by splitting/combining the two halves of the SWX, showing excellent performance with low excess loss and low crosstalk over an ultrawide bandwidth. Both elementary switch and a 64x64 switch array based on Benes topology are fabricated and characterized, demonstrating great potential for practical scenarios such as photonic interconnect/routing, Lidar and spectroscopy, photonic computing, as well as microwave photonics.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2023

Efficiency-boosted semiconductor optical amplifiers via mode-division multiplexing

Semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOA) are a fundamental building block for many photonic systems. However, their power inefficiency has been setting back operational cost reduction, and the resulting thermal losses constrain miniaturization, and the realization of more complex photonic functions such as large-scale switches and optical phased arrays. In this work, we demonstrate significant gain and efficiency enhancement using an extra degree of freedom of light - the mode space. This is done without changing the SOA's material design, and therefore high versatility and compatibility can be obtained. Light is multiplexed in different guided modes and is reinjected into the same gain section twice without introducing resonance, doubling the interaction length in a broadband manner. Up to 87% higher gain and 300% higher wall-plug efficiency are obtained in a double-pass SOA compared to a conventional single-pass SOA, at the same operating current, in the wavelength range of 1560 - 1580 nm.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2022

Realization of advanced passive silicon photonic devices with subwavelength-grating structures developed by efficient inverse design

The realization of ultra-compact passive silicon photonic devices is becoming more and more important for the future large-scale photonic integration as desired for many systems. Although some compact silicon photonic devices have been demonstrated by using inverse design, the device performance is still insufficient for real applications. Here, we propose and realize several representative ultra-compact advanced passive silicon photonic devices with decent performances by introducing subwavelength-grating (SWG) structures developed by our high-efficiency inverse design method. These devices are designed by optimally manipulating the multimode excitation and the multimode interference in a region defined with SWG structures. These SWG structures with excellent feature-size uniformity are more fabrication-friendly than those random nano-structures used in previous inverse-designed photonic devices. The high-efficiency of our inverse design method is attributed to a novel search-space-dimension control strategy and the efficient problem-oriented electromagnetic-field solvers available for SWG structures. Specifically, we present the realization of a 6-channel mode (de)multiplexer, a broadband 90{\deg}-hybrid, and a two-channel flat-top wavelength demultiplexer as some examples, which can hardly be realized by previously reported inverse design approaches. These devices exhibit ultra-compact footprints as well as decent performances when compared to the counterparts developed by the classical theory.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2022

High-speed graphene-silicon-graphene waveguide PDs with high photo-to-dark-current ratio and large linear dynamic range

Two-dimensional materials (2DMs) meet the demand of broadband and low-cost photodetection on silicon for many applications. Currently, it is still very challenging to realize excellent silicon-2DM PDs. Here we demonstrate graphene-silicon-graphene waveguide PDs operating at the wavelength-bands of 1.55 {\mu}m and 2 {\mu}m, showing the potential for large-scale integration. For the fabricated PDs, the measured responsivities are respectively ~0.15 mA/W and ~0.015 mA/W for the wavelengths of 1.55 {\mu}m and 1.96{\mu}m. In particular, the PDs exhibit a high bandwidth of ~33 GHz, an ultra-low dark current of tens of pico-amperes, a high normalized photo-to-dark-current ratio (NPDR) of 1.63x10^6 W^-1, as well as a high linear dynamic range of 3 {\mu}W-1.86 mW (and beyond) at 1.55 {\mu}m. According to the measurement results for the wavelength-bands of 1.55/2.0 {\mu}m and the theoretical modeling for the silicon-graphene heterostructure, it is revealed that internal photo-emission and photo-assisted thermionic field emission dominantly contribute to the photoresponse in the graphene-silicon Schottky junctions, which helps the future work to further improve the performance.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2022

Ultra-compact Si/In$_2$O$_3$ hybrid plasmonic waveguide modulator with a high bandwidth beyond 40 GHz

Optical modulators are required to have high modulation bandwidths and a compact footprint. In this paper we experimentally demonstrate a novel Si/In$_2$O$_3$ hybrid plasmonic waveguide modulator, which is realized by an asymmetric directional coupler (ADC) consisting of a silicon photonic waveguide and a Si/In$_2$O$_3$ hybrid plasmonic waveguide. The optical signal is modulated by radio-frequency (RF) signal applied on the Au electrodes at the top of MOS capacitor and contacting the In$_2$O$_3$ thin film. The record-high modulation bandwidth of >40 GHz is realized by a silicon-doping-free metal-oxide-In$_2$O$_3$ capacitor integrated in a 3.5-$\mu$m-long asymmetric directional coupler (ADC) for the first time.

physics.app-ph↗

arXiv2021

Towards calibration-free Mach-Zehnder switches on silicon

Silicon photonic Mach-Zehnder switches (MZSs) have been extensively investigated as a promising candidate for practical optical interconnects. However, conventional 2{\times}2 MZSs are usually prone to the size variations of the arm waveguides due to imperfect fabrication, resulting in considerable random phase imbalance between the two arms, thereby imposing significant challenges for further scaling up NN MZSs. Here we propose a novel design towards calibration-free 2{\times}2 and N{\times}N MZSs, employing optimally widened arm waveguides, enabled by novel compact tapered Euler S-bends with incorporated mode filters. With standard 180-nm CMOS foundry processes, more than thirty 2{\times}2 MZSs and one 4{\times}4 Benes MZS with the new design are fabricated and characterized. Compared with their conventional counterparts with 0.45-{\mu}m-wide arm waveguides, the present 2{\times}2 MZSs exhibit ~370-fold reduction in the random phase imbalance. The measured extinction ratios of the present 2{\times}2 and 4{\times}4 MZSs operating in the all-cross state are ~30 dB and ~20 dB across the wavelength range of ~60 nm, respectively, even without any calibrations. This work paves the way towards calibration-free large-scale N{\times}N silicon photonic MZSs.

physics.app-ph↗

arXiv2021

New-generation silicon photonics beyond the singlemode regime

The singlemode condition is one of the most important design rules for optical waveguides in guided-wave optics. The reason following the singlemode condition is that higher-order modes might be excited and thus introduce some undesired mode-mismatching loss as well as inter-mode crosstalk when light propagates along an optical waveguide beyond the singlemode regime. As a result, multimode photonic waveguides are usually not allowed. In this paper, we propose the concept of silicon photonics beyond the singlemode regime, developed with low-loss and low-crosstalk light propagation in multimode photonic waveguides with broadened silicon cores. In particular, silicon photonic waveguides with a broadened core region have shown an ultra-low-loss of ~0.1 dB/cm for the fundamental mode even without any special fabrication process. A micro-racetrack resonator fabricated with standard 220-nm-SOI MPW-foundry processes shows a record intrinsic Q-factor as high as 1.02*107 for the first time, corresponding to ultra-low waveguide propagation loss of only 0.065 dB/cm. A high-performance microwave photonic filter on silicon is then realized with an ultra-narrow 3-dB bandwidth of 20.6 MHz as well as a tuning range of ~20 GHz for the first time. An on-chip 100-cm-long delayline is also demonstrated by using the present broadened SOI photonic waveguides with compact Euler-curve bends, the measured propagation loss is ~0.14 dB/cm. The proposed concept of silicon photonics beyond the singlemode regime helps solve the issue of high propagation loss and also significantly reduces the random phase errors of light due to the random variations of waveguide dimensions. In particularity it enables silicon photonic devices with enhanced performances, which paves the way for new-generation silicon photonics realizing the large-scale photonic integration.

physics.optics↗