Advances in lithium niobate photonics: development status and perspectives

Lithium niobate (LN) has experienced significant developments during past decades due to its versatile properties, especially its large electro-optic (EO) coefficient. For example, bulk LN-based modulators with high speeds and a superior linearity are widely used in typical fiber-optic communication...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Advanced photonics 2022-05, Vol.4 (3), p.034003-034003
Main Authors: Chen, Guanyu, Li, Nanxi, Ng, Jun Da, Lin, Hong-Lin, Zhou, Yanyan, Fu, Yuan Hsing, Lee, Lennon Yao Ting, Yu, Yu, Liu, Ai-Qun, Danner, Aaron J.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acousto-optics
Communications systems
Crystal structure
Devices
Electric fields
Fiber optics
Lithium
Lithium niobates
Material properties
Modulators
Photonics
Pyroelectricity
Refractivity
Signal transmission
Silicon
Thin films
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Summary:Lithium niobate (LN) has experienced significant developments during past decades due to its versatile properties, especially its large electro-optic (EO) coefficient. For example, bulk LN-based modulators with high speeds and a superior linearity are widely used in typical fiber-optic communication systems. However, with ever-increasing demands for signal transmission capacity, the high power and large size of bulk LN-based devices pose great challenges, especially when one of its counterparts, integrated silicon photonics, has experienced dramatic developments in recent decades. Not long ago, high-quality thin-film LN on insulator (LNOI) became commercially available, which has paved the way for integrated LN photonics and opened a hot research area of LN photonics devices. LNOI allows a large refractive index contrast, thus light can be confined within a more compact structure. Together with other properties of LN, such as nonlinear/acousto-optic/pyroelectric effects, various kinds of high-performance integrated LN devices can be demonstrated. A comprehensive summary of advances in LN photonics is provided. As LN photonics has experienced several decades of development, our review includes some of the typical bulk LN devices as well as recently developed thin film LN devices. In this way, readers may be inspired by a complete picture of the evolution of this technology. We first introduce the basic material properties of LN and several key processing technologies for fabricating photonics devices. After that, various kinds of functional devices based on different effects are summarized. Finally, we give a short summary and perspective of LN photonics. We hope this review can give readers more insight into recent advances in LN photonics and contribute to the further development of LN related research.
ISSN:2577-5421
2577-5421
DOI:10.1117/1.AP.4.3.034003