arXiv subjects

Jianlin Zhao

Publications and source records attributed to Jianlin Zhao.

33 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

Hybrid vector beams with non-uniform orbital angular momentum density induced by designed azimuthal polarization gradient

Based on angular amplitude modulation of orthogonal base vectors in common-path interference method, we propose an interesting type of hybrid vector beams with unprecedented azimuthal polarization gradient and demonstrate in experiment. Distinct to previously reported types, the synthetic hybrid vector beams exhibit geometrically intriguing projection tracks of angular polarization state on Poincare sphere, more than just conventional circles. More noteworthily, the designed azimuthal polarization gradients are found to be able to induce azimuthally non-uniform orbital angular momentum density, while generally uniform for circle-track cases, immersing in homogenous intensity background whatever base states are. Moreover, via tailoring relevant parameters, more special polarization mapping tracks can be handily achieved. These peculiar features may open alternative routes for new optical effects and applications.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2019

Optically active beams: non-reciprocal optical activity in free space induced by spin-orbital interaction of light

Optical activity, the power of a medium to rotate the polarization of a light beam, has contributed significantly to molecular structure assessments in stereochemistry, biomolecular science and crystallography. Thus far, it is commonly believed that optical activity is manifested only in the chiral media which can give rise to circular birefringence of light. Here, we experimentally demonstrate that free space can also support the implementation of non-reciprocal optical activity with Bessel beams by spin-orbital interaction. Specifically, non-diffractive optically active beams are realized, with their optical rotatory power readily controlled by simple optical elements. We show that such free-space optical activity can be exploited to form non-reciprocal optical components such as polarization rotators, isolators, and circulators. Our results may bring about new possibilities of media-independent optical activity to other transverse waves ranging from radio to optical frequencies.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2019

Fano resonance lineshapes in a waveguide-microring structure enabled by an air-hole

We propose and demonstrate, by simply inserting an air-hole in the waveguide side-coupling with a microring resonator (MRR), the transmission spectrum presents Fano lineshapes at all of the resonant modes. Measured from the fabricated devices, Fano lineshapes with slope rates over 400 dB/nm and extinction ratios over 20 dB are obtained. We ascribe it to the air-hole-induced phase-shift between the discrete resonant modes of the MRR and the continuum propagating mode of the bus-waveguide, which modifies their interference lineshapes from symmetric Lorentzian to asymmetric Fano. From devices with varied locations and diameters of the air-hole, different Fano asymmetric parameters are extracted, verifying the air-hole-induced phase-shifts. This air-hole-assisted waveguide-MRR structure for achieving Fano resonance lineshapes has advantages of simple design, compact footprint, large tolerance of fabrication errors, as well as broadband operation range. It has great potentials to expand and improve performances of on-chip MRR-based devices, including sensors, switchings and filters.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2019

Second harmonic and sum-frequency generations from a silicon metasurface integrated with a two-dimensional material

Silicon-based nonlinear metasurfaces were implemented only with third-order nonlinearity due to the crystal centrosymmetry and the efficiencies are considerably low, which hinders their practical applications with low-power lasers. Here, we propose to integrate a two-dimensional GaSe flake onto a silicon metasurface to assist high-efficiency second-order nonlinear processes, including second-harmonic generation (SHG) and sum-frequency generation (SFG). By resonantly pumping the integrated GaSe-metasurface, which supports a Fano resonance, the obtained SHG is about two orders of magnitude stronger than the third-harmonic generation from the bare silicon metasurface. In addition, thanks to the resonant field enhancement and GaSe's strong second-order nonlinearity, SHG of the integrated structure could be excited successfully with a low-power continuous-wave laser, which makes it possible to further implement SFG. The high-efficiency second-order nonlinear processes assisted by two-dimensional materials present potentials to expand silicon metasurface's functionalities in nonlinear regime.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2019

A compact structure for realizing Lorentzian, Fano and EIT resonance lineshapes in a microring resonator

Microring resonators, as a fundamental building block of photonic integrated circuits, have been well developed into numerous functional devices, whose performances are strongly determined by microring's resonance lineshapes. We propose a compact structure to reliably realize Lorentzian, Fano, and electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) resonance lineshapes in a microring. By simply inserting two air-holes in the side-coupled waveguide of a microring, a Fabry-Perot (FP) resonance is involved to couple with microring's resonant modes, showing Lorentzian, Fano, and EIT lineshapes over one free spectral range of the FP resonance. The quality factors, extinction ratios, and slope rates in different lineshapes are discussed. At microring's specific resonant wavelength, the lineshape could be tuned among these three types by controlling the FP cavity's length. Experiment results verify the theoretical analysis well and represent Fano lineshapes with extinction ratios of about 20 dB and slope rates over 280 dB/nm. The reliably and flexibly tunable lineshapes in the compact structure have potentials to improve microring-based devices and expand their application scopes.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2018

Valley vortex states and degeneracy lifting via photonic higher-band excitation

We demonstrate valley-dependent vortex generation in a photonic graphene. Without breaking the inversion symmetry, excitation of two equivalent valleys leads to formation of an optical vortex upon Bragg-reflection to the third valley, with its chirality determined by the valley degree of freedom. Vortex-antivortex pairs with valley-dependent topological charge flipping are also observed and corroborated by numerical simulations. Furthermore, we develop a three-band effective Hamiltonian model to describe the dynamics of the coupled valleys, and find that the commonly used two-band model is not sufficient to explain the observed vortex degeneracy lifting. Such valley-polarized vortex states arise from high-band excitation without inversion symmetry breaking or synthetic-field-induced gap opening. Our results from a photonic setting may provide insight for the study of valley contrasting and Berry-phase mediated topological phenomena in other systems.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2018

Low-power continuous-wave second harmonic generation in semiconductor nanowires

Semiconductor nanowires (NWs) are promising for realizing various on-chip nonlinear optical devices, due to their nanoscale lateral confinement and strong light-matter interaction. However, high-intensity pulsed pump lasers are typically needed to exploit their optical nonlinearity because light couples poorly with nanometric-size wires. Here, we demonstrate microwatts continuous-wave light pumped second harmonic generation (SHG) in AlGaAs NWs by integrating them with silicon planar photonic crystal cavities. Light-NW coupling is enhanced effectively by the extremely localized cavity mode at the subwavelength scale. Strong SHG is obtained even with a continuous-wave laser excitation with a pump power down to ~3 uW, and the cavity-enhancement factor is estimated around 150. Additionally, in the integrated device, the NW's SHG is more than two-order of magnitude stronger than third harmonic generations in the silicon slab, though the NW only couple s with less than 1% of the cavity mode. This significantly reduced power-requirement of NW's nonlinear frequency conversion would promote NW-based building blocks for nonlinear optics, specially in chip-integrated coherent light sources, entangled photon-pairs and signal processing devices.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2018

Multiple optical frequency-conversions in few-layer GaSe assisted by a photonic crystal cavity

While two-dimensional (2D) materials have intriguing second-order nonlinearities with ultrahigh coefficient and electrical tunability, their atomic layer thicknesses hinder explorations of other optical frequency-conversions (OFCs) than second harmonic generation (SHG) due to inefficient light-coupling and unachievable phase-matching. We report, by resonantly pumping a photonic crystal cavity integrated with a few-layer GaSe, it is possible to realize multiple second-order nonlinear processes in GaSe even with microwatts continuous wave pumps, including SHGs, sum-frequency generations (SFGs), cascaded SFGs and their induced third harmonic generations. These OFCs arise from the significant cavity-enhancements. The enhancement factor of a SHG process is estimated exceeding 1,300. The cascaded SFGs have comparably strong intensities with those of SHGs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first observation of cascaded second-order nonlinear processes in 2D materials. The cavity-assisted OFCs could provide a view to study deterministic OFCs in 2D materials with low pump power and expand their optoelectronic applications to nonlinear regime.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2018

Extraordinary second harmonic generation in ReS2 atomic crystals

We report the observations of unexpected layer-dependent, strong, and anisotropic second harmonic generations (SHGs) in atomically thin ReS2. Appreciable (negligible) SHGs are obtained from even (odd) numbers of ReS2 layers, which is opposite to the layer-dependence of SHGs in group VI transition metal dichalcogenides, such as MoS2 and WS2. The results are analyzed from ReS2's crystal structure, implying second harmonic polarizations generated from the interlayer coupling. Pumped by a telecomband laser, SHG from the bilayer ReS2 is almost one order of magnitude larger than that from the monolayer WS2. The estimated second-order nonlinear susceptibility of 900 pm/V is remarkably high among those reported in two-dimensional materials. The laser polarization dependence of ReS2's SHG is strongly anisotropic and indicates its distorted lattice structure with more unequal and non-zero second-order susceptibility elements.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2018

Second harmonic generation in atomically thin MoTe2

We have studied on optical second harmonic generations (SHGs) from atomically thin MoTe2 flakes with 2H and 1T' phases. From 2H-MoTe2 samples with odd (even) numbers of layers, strong (negligible) SHGs are observed due to the layer-dependent broken inversion symmetry. When pumped by a telecom-band laser, SHG from a monolayer 2H-MoTe2 is about one order of magnitude stronger than that from a monolayer WS2; an extremely high second-order nonlinear susceptibility of 2.5 nm/V is estimated, presenting the highest value among those reported in two-dimensional materials. SHG measurements in MoTe2 are also demonstrated as an efficient way to distinguish the 2H-to-1T' phase transition. Comparing to the SHG in 2H-MoTe2, 1T'-MoTe2's SHG has much lower efficiency and the polarization dependence is changed from six-fold to two-lobe pattern.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2017

Cylindrical vector resonant modes achieved in planar photonic crystal cavities with enlarged air-holes

We reveal a triangular-lattice planar photonic crystal supports Bloch modes with radially and azimuthally symmetric electric field distributions at the top band-edge of the first photonic band. Bifurcated from the corresponding Bloch modes, two cylindrical vector resonant modes are achieved by simply enlarging the central air-hole of the planar photonic crystal, which have high quality factors around 3,000 and small mode volume. The far-field radiations of the two resonant modes present high-quality cylindrical vector beam profiles. The resonant modes could be optimized by modifying the six nearest neighboring air-holes around the central defect. The cylindrically symmetric characteristics of the resonant mode's near- and far-fields might provide a new view to investigate light-matter interactions and device developments in planar photonic crystal cavities.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2017

Microwatts continuous-wave pumped second harmonic generation in few- and mono-layer GaSe

We demonstrate the first achievement of continuous-wave (CW) pumped second harmonic generation (SHG) in few- and mono-layer gallium selenide (GaSe) flakes, which are coated on silicon photonic crystal (PC) cavities. Because of ultrahigh second order nonlinearity of the two-dimensional (2D) GaSe and localized resonant mode in the PC cavity, SHG's pump power is greatly reduced to microwatts. In a nine-layer GaSe coated PC cavity, while the optical power inside the GaSe flake is only 1.5 percent of that in the silicon PC slab, the SHG in GaSe is more than 650 times stronger than the third harmonic generation in silicon slab, indicating 2D GaSe's great potentials to strengthen nonlinear processes in silicon photonics. Our study opens up a new view to expand 2D materials' optoelectronic applications in nonlinear regime and chip-integrated active devices.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2017

High performance graphene oxide-based humidity sensor integrated on a photonic crystal cavity

We report a high performance relative humidity (RH) microsensor by coating a few-layer graphene oxide (GO) flake over a photonic crystal (PC) cavity. Since the GO layer has a high water-activity and interacts with the evanescent cavity mode strongly, the exposure of GO-PC cavity in varied humidity levels results in significant resonant wavelength shifts, showing a slope of 0.68 nm/%RH in the range of 60%-85% RH. By interrogating the power variation of the cavity reflection, the microsensor presents an ultrahigh sensitivity exceeding 3.9 dB/%RH. Relying on the unimpeded permeation of water molecules through the GO interlayers and microscale distribution of the cavity mode, the integrated sensor has a response time less than 100 ms, which promises successful measurements of human breathing. Combining with the ease of fabrication, this high performance RH sensor has potential applications requiring optical access, device compactness, and fast dynamic response.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2014

Generation of vector beams in planar photonic crystal cavities with multiple missing-hole defects

We propose a novel method to generate vector beams in planar photonic crystal cavities with multiple missing-hole defects. Simulating the resonant modes in the cavities, we observe that the optical fields in each defect have different phase and polarization state distributions, which promise the compositions of vector beams by the scattered light from the defects. The far-field radiation patterns of the cavity modes calculated via the Sommerfeld diffraction theory present vector beams possessing hollow intensity profiles and polarization singularities. In addition, the extraction efficiencies of the vector beams from the cavities could be improved by modifying the air-holes surrounding the defects. This planar photonic crystal cavity-based vector beam generator may provide useful insights for the on-chip controlling of vector beams in their propagations and interactions with matter.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2013

Beam steering and topological transformations driven by interactions between discrete vortex and fundamental solitons

We study coherent and incoherent interactions between discrete vortex and fundamental solitons in two-dimensional photonic lattices, presenting a new scheme for all-optical routings and topological transformations of vorticities. Due to the multi-lobe intensity and step-phase structure of the discrete vortex soliton, the coherent soliton-interactions allow both solitons to be steered into multiple different possible destination ports depending on the initial phase of the discrete fundamental soliton. We show that charge-flipping of phase singularities and orbital angular momentum transfer can occur during the coherent interactions between the two solitons. For incoherent interactions, by controlling the relative intensities of the two solitons, we reveal that soliton-steering can be realized by either attracting the discrete fundamental soliton to four ports or localizing the four-lobe discrete vortex soliton into a ring soliton.

physics.optics↗