Cryogenic Operation of Silicon Photonic Electro-Optic Modulators based on DC Kerr Effect

ORAL

Abstract

Scalable photonic integrated circuits operating at cryogenic temperatures are essential for quantum information processing and supercomputing. The silicon-on-insulator platform is highly promising for its compactness and CMOS compatibility. However, efficient electro-optic modulation in silicon at cryogenic temperatures remains an outstanding challenge, owing to carrier freeze-out at cryogenic temperatures in conventional plasma-dispersion-based modulators [1]. The generation of an induced second-order nonlinearity in silicon with an applied DC electric field has been demonstrated at room temperature [2]. In this work, we demonstrate DC Kerr-based modulation in silicon at a temperature of 5K at GHz speeds, showing the potential of DC Kerr modulators for use in large-scale silicon photonic integrated circuits for cryogenic computing.

[1] Gehl, M., et al. Optica 4.3, 374-382 (2017)
[2] Timurdogan, E., et al. Nature Photonics 11.3, 200 (2017)

*U.C. is supported by a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship. J.C. is supported by EU H2020 Marie Sklodowska-Curie Grant Number 751016. Devices were fabricated under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) DODOS program (Grant No. HR0011-15-C-0056). This work is supported in part by PsiQuantum.

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Presenters

  • Uttara Chakraborty

    • Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Authors

  • Uttara Chakraborty

    • Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  • Jacques Carolan

    • Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
    • Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT

  • Genevieve Clark

    • MITRE Corporation

  • Darius Bunandar

    • Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
    • Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT

  • Jelena Notaros

    • Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  • Michael R. Watts

    • Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  • Dirk R. Englund

    • Massachusetts Institute of Technology
    • Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT
    • Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT
    • Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology