Integrated photonics on thin-film lithium niobate

Lithium niobate (LN), an outstanding and versatile material, has influenced our daily life for decades: from enabling high-speed optical communications that form the backbone of the Internet to realizing radio-frequency filtering used in our cell phones. This half-century-old material is currently e...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2021-02
Main Authors: Zhu, Di, Shao, Linbo, Yu, Mengjie, Cheng, Rebecca, Desiatov, Boris, Xin, C J, Hu, Yaowen, Holzgrafe, Jeffrey, Ghosh, Soumya, Shams-Ansari, Amirhassan, Puma, Eric, Sinclair, Neil, Reimer, Christian, Zhang, Mian, Lončar, Marko
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acousto-optics
Converters
Electro-optics
Lithium niobates
Modulators
Nanofabrication
Nonlinearity
Optical communication
Optical frequency
Optics
Passive components
Photonics
Quantum phenomena
Signal processing
Thin films
Transducers
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Summary:Lithium niobate (LN), an outstanding and versatile material, has influenced our daily life for decades: from enabling high-speed optical communications that form the backbone of the Internet to realizing radio-frequency filtering used in our cell phones. This half-century-old material is currently embracing a revolution in thin-film LN integrated photonics. The success of manufacturing wafer-scale, high-quality, thin films of LN on insulator (LNOI), accompanied with breakthroughs in nanofabrication techniques, have made high-performance integrated nanophotonic components possible. With rapid development in the past few years, some of these thin-film LN devices, such as optical modulators and nonlinear wavelength converters, have already outperformed their legacy counterparts realized in bulk LN crystals. Furthermore, the nanophotonic integration enabled ultra-low-loss resonators in LN, which unlocked many novel applications such as optical frequency combs and quantum transducers. In this Review, we cover -- from basic principles to the state of the art -- the diverse aspects of integrated thin-film LN photonics, including the materials, basic passive components, and various active devices based on electro-optics, all-optical nonlinearities, and acousto-optics. We also identify challenges that this platform is currently facing and point out future opportunities. The field of integrated LNOI photonics is advancing rapidly and poised to make critical impacts on a broad range of applications in communication, signal processing, and quantum information.
ISSN:2331-8422
DOI:10.48550/arxiv.2102.11956