Tunable and efficient ultraviolet generation with periodically poled lithium niobate

Abstract

On-chip ultraviolet (UV) sources are of great interest for building compact and scalable atomic clocks, quantum computers, and spectrometers. However, few material platforms are suitable for integrated UV light generation and manipulation. Of these materials, thin-film lithium niobate offers unique advantages such as sub-micron modal confinement, strong nonlinearity, and quasi-phase matching. Despite these characteristics, its utilization in the UV has remained elusive because of the substantial sensitivity of standard quasi-phase matching to fabrication imperfections, the photorefractive effect, and relatively large losses in this range. Here, we present efficient (197 ± 5%/W/cm2) second harmonic generation of UV-A light in a periodically poled lithium niobate nanophotonic waveguide. We achieve on-chip UV powers of ∼30 µW and linear wavelength tunability using temperature. These results are enabled with large cross section waveguides, which leads to first-order UV quasi-phase-matching with relatively long poling periods (>1.5 µm). By varying the poling period, we have achieved the shortest reported wavelength (355 nm) generated through frequency doubling in thin-film lithium niobate. Our results open up new avenues for UV on-chip sources and chip-scale photonics through compact frequency-doubling of common near-IR laser diodes.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Jul 20, 2023
Source ID
10.1364/ol.491528

Entities

People

  • Alireza Marandi
  • Emily Hwang
  • Luis Ledezma
  • Nathan Harper
  • Ryoto Sekine
  • Scott K Cushing

Organizations

  • Air Force Office of Scientific Research
  • California Institute of Technology
  • National Science Foundation
  • United States Department of Energy

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Physics

Readers

  • Materials Science and Engineering.
  • Quantum Dot Semiconductor Device Photonics and Graphene Optoelectronic Materials and THz Physics.
  • Spectroscopy.

Technology Areas

  • Directed Energy
  • Quantum Computing