English

Photon-level tuning of photonic nanocavities

Optics 2021-09-14 v2

Abstract

Energy-efficient optical control of photonic device properties is crucial for diverse photonic signal processing. Here we demonstrate extremely efficient optical tuning of photonic nanocavities, with only photon-level optical energy. With a lithium niobate photonic crystal nanocavity with an optical Q up to 1.41 million and an effective mode volume down to 0.78(λ/n)3(\lambda/n)^3, we are able to achieve a resonance tuning rate of about 88.4~MHz/photon (0.67~GHz/aJ), which allows us to tune across the whole cavity resonance with only about 2.4 photons on average inside the cavity. Such a photon-level resonance tuning is of great potential for energy-efficient optical switching, wavelength routing, and reconfiguration of photonic devices/circuits that are indispensable for future photonic interconnect.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1904.03728,
  title  = {Photon-level tuning of photonic nanocavities},
  author = {Mingxiao Li and Hanxiao Liang and Rui Luo and Yang He and Jingwei Ling and Qiang Lin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1904.03728},
  year   = {2021}
}