Erbium-doped lithium niobate on insulator (Er:LNOI) has attracted enormous interest as it provides gain and enables integrated amplifiers and lasers on the lithium niobate on insulator (LNOI) platform. We demonstrate a highly efficient waveguide amplifier on Er:LNOI. The 2.58-cm long amplifier can achieve 27.94 dB signal enhancement, 16.0 dB internal net gain (6.20 dB/cm), -8.84 dBm saturation power, 4.59 dB/mW power conversion efficiency, and 4.49 dB noise figure at 1531.6 nm. Besides, thorough investigation on the pumping wavelength, pumping scheme, output power and noise figure have been performed to provide a comprehensive understanding on this novel waveguide amplifier. This work will benefit the development of a powerful gain platform and can pave the way for a fully integrated photonic system on LNOI platform.
Erbium-doped lithium niobate high-Q microdisk cavities were fabricated in batches by UV exposure, inductively coupled plasma reactive ion etching and chemo-mechanical polishing. The stimulated emission at 1531.6 nm was observed under the pump of a narrow-band laser working at 974 nm in erbium-doped lithium niobate microdisk cavity with threshold down to 400 μW and a conversion efficiency of 3.1{\times}10^{-4} %, laying the foundation for the LNOI integrated light source research.
Integrated optical amplifiers and light sources are of great significance for photonic integrated circuits (PICs) and have attracted many research interests. Doping rare-earth ions in materials as a solution to realize efficient optical amplifiers and lasing has been investigated a lot. We investigate the erbium-doped lithium niobate on insulator (LNOI). Here, spiral waveguide amplifiers were fabricated on a 1-mol\% erbium-doped LNOI by CMOS-compatible technique. We demonstrated a maximum internal net gain of 8.3 dB at 1530 nm indicating a net gain per unit length of 15.6 dB/cm with a compact …
The commercialization of lithium niobate on insulator (LNOI) wafer has sparked significant on-chip photonic integration application due to its remarkable photonic, photoacoustic, electro-optic and piezoelectric nature. A variety of on-chip LNOI-based optical devices with high performance has been realized in recent years. Here we developed 1 mol\% erbium-doped LN crystal and its LNOI wafer, and fabricated an erbium-doped LNOI microdisk with high quality ($ \sim $ 1.05$\times 10^{^5}$ ). C-band laser emission with $ \sim $1530 nm and $ \sim $1560 nm from the high-Q erbium-doped LNOI microdisk w…
Lithium niobate on insulator (LNOI) is an emerging photonic platform with great promises for future optical communications, nonlinear optics and microwave photonics. An important integrated photonic building block, active waveguide amplifiers, however, is still missing in the LNOI platform. Here we report an efficient and compact waveguide amplifier based on erbium-doped LNOI waveguides, realized by a sequence of erbium-doped crystal growth, ion slicing and lithography-based waveguide fabrication. Using a compact 5-mm-long waveguide, we demonstrate on-chip net gain of > 5 dB for 1530-nm signal…
Lithium niobate on insulator (LNOI), as an emerging and promising optical integration platform, faces shortages of on-chip active devices including lasers and amplifiers. Here, we report the fabrication on-chip erbium-doped LNOI waveguide amplifiers based on electron beam lithography and inductively coupled plasma reactive ion etching. A net internal gain of ~30 dB/cm in communication band was achieved in the fabricated waveguide amplifiers under the pump of a 974-nm continuous laser. This work develops new active devices on LNOI and will promote the development of LNOI integrated photonics.
We overcome the difficulty in realizing a monolithic waveguide-coupled microring laser integrated on erbium-doped thin film lithium niobate (Er: TFLN) using photolithography assisted chemo-mechanical etching (PLACE) technique. We demonstrate an integrated single-frequency microring laser operating around 1531 nm wavelength. The PLACE technique, enabling integrated Er: TFLN photonics with low propagation loss, can thus be used to realize low cost mass production of monolithic on-chip microlasers with applications ranging from optical communication and photonic integrated circuit (PIC) to precis…
We demonstrate on-chip light amplification with integrated optical waveguide fabricated on erbium-doped thin film lithium niobate on insulator (TFLNOI) using the photolithography assisted chemo-mechanical etching (PLACE) technique. A maximum internal net gain of 18 dB in the small-signal-gain regime is measured at the peak emission wavelength of 1530 nm for a waveguide length of 3.6 cm, indicating a differential gain per unit length of 5 dB/cm. This work paves the way to the monolithic integration of diverse active and passive photonic components on the TFLNOI platform.
Erbium doped integrated waveguide amplifier and laser prevail in power consumption, footprint, stability and scalability over the counterparts in bulk materials, underpinning the lightwave communication and large-scale sensing. Subject to the highly confined mode and moderate propagation loss, gain and power scaling in such integrated micro-to-nanoscale devices prove to be more challenging compared to their bulk counterparts. In this work, stimulated by the prevalent success of double-cladding optical fiber in high-gain/power operation, a Ta2O5 cladding is employed in the erbium doped lithium …
As an active material with favorable linear and nonlinear optical properties, thin-film lithium niobate has demonstrated its potential in integrated photonics. Integration with rare-earth ions, which are promising candidates for quantum memories and transducers, will enrich the system with new applications in quantum information processing. Here, we investigate the optical properties at 1.5 micron wavelengths of rare-earth ions (Er$^{3+}$) implanted in thin-film lithium niobate waveguides and micro-ring resonators. Optical quality factors near a million after post annealing show that ion impla…
Lithium niobate on insulator (LNOI), regarded as an important candidate platform for optical integration due to its excellent nonlinear, electro-optic and other physical properties, has become a research hotspot. Light source, as an essential component for integrated optical system, is urgently needed. In this paper, we reported the realization of 1550-nm band on-chip LNOI microlasers based on erbium-doped LNOI ring cavities with loaded quality factors higher than one million, which were fabricated by using electron beam lithography and inductively coupled plasma reactive ion etching processes…
Erbium-doped fiber amplifiers have revolutionized long-haul optical communications and laser technology. Erbium ions could equally provide a basis for efficient optical amplification in photonic integrated circuits. However, this approach has thus far remained impractical due to insufficient output power. Here, we demonstrate a photonic integrated circuit based erbium amplifier reaching 145 mW output power and more than 30 dB small-signal gain -- on par with commercial fiber amplifiers and beyond state-of-the-art III-V heterogeneously integrated semiconductor amplifiers. We achieve this by app…
MOE Key Laboratory of Weak-Light Nonlinear Photonics, TEDA Institute of Applied Physics and School of Physics, Nankai University（南开大学弱光非线性光子学教育部重点实验室、泰达应用物理研究院和物理学院）；School of Science, Jiangsu University of Science and Technology（江苏科技大学理学院）
The influence of low temperatures on the performance of a high-power single-frequency fiber laser amplifier is evaluated with a numerical simulation. Cooling the fiber can allow to take advantage of both higher damping of the acoustic waves in the silica glass, and higher laser efficiency. We first report on the measurement of the stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) threshold in a silica fiber as a function of the temperature from 300~K down to 77~K. We then present the measurements of small-signal absorption and gain spectra of an erbium doped alumino-phosphosilicate fiber, at room temperat…
The erbium-doped Lithium niobate on insulator (Er:LNOI) platform has great promise in the application of telecommunication, microwave photonics, and quantum photonics due to its excellent electro-optic, piezo-electric, nonlinear nature as well as the gain characteristics in the telecommunication C-band. Here, we report a single-frequency Er:LNOI integrated laser based on dual-cavity structure. Facilitated by the Vernier effect and gain competition, the single-frequency laser can operate stably at 1531-nm wavelength with a 1484-nm pump laser. The output laser has a power of 0.31 uW, a linewidth…
We demonstrate a 7-core erbium doped fiber amplifier employing side pumping using tapered multimode fiber. The amplifier has multicore inputs and outputs which can be readily spliced to multicore transmission fiber for amplifying space division multiplexed signals. Gain over 25dB was obtained in each of the cores over a 40-nm bandwidth covering C-band.
We report the fabrication and optical characterization of Yb3+-doped waveguide amplifiers (YDWA) on the thin film lithium niobate fabricated by photolithography assisted chemo-mechanical etching. The fabricated Yb3+-doped lithium niobate waveguides demonstrates low propagation loss of 0.13 dB/cm at 1030 nm and 0.1 dB/cm at 1060 nm. The internal net gain of 5 dB at 1030 nm and 8 dB at 1060 nm are measured on a 4.0 cm long waveguide pumped by 976nm laser diodes, indicating the gain per unit length of 1.25 dB/cm at 1030 nm and 2 dB/cm at 1060 nm, respectively. The integrated Yb3+-doped lithium ni…
We demonstrate wavelength-wavelength correlations of classical broad-band amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) photons emitted by an erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) in a wavelength regime around 1530nm. We then apply these classical correlated photons in the framework of a real-world ghost spectroscopy experiment at a wavelength of 1533nm to acetylene (C2H2) reproducing the characteristic absorption features of the C-H stretch and rotational bands. This proof-of-principle experiment confirms the generalization of an ASE source concept offering an attractive light source for classical ghost…
In this paper, we report an experimental study of noise features of polarized and unpolarized amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) with narrow optical bandwidth, registered from a conventional low-doped erbium fiber. We demonstrate that ASE noise can be considered as train of Gaussian-like pulses with random magnitudes, widths, and inter- pulse intervals. The statistical properties of these three parameters of noise pulsing are analyzed. We also present the results on the influence of ASE noise upon optical spectrum broadening, produced by self-phase modulation at propagating along communicati…
We describe a method to measure the spectral radiance of a source in an absolute way without the need of a reference. Here we give the necessary detail to allow for the device to be reproduced from standard fiber-optic components. The device is suited for fiber-optic applications at telecom wavelengths and calibration of powermeters and spectrometers at light levels from 1nW to 1uW.
Space-division multiplexing (SDM), whereby multiple spatial channels in multimode and multicore optical fibers are used to increase the total transmission capacity per fiber, is being investigated to avert a data capacity crunch and reduce the cost per transmitted bit. With the number of channels employed in SDM transmission experiments continuing to rise, there is a requirement for integrated SDM components that are scalable. Here, we demonstrate a cladding-pumped SDM erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) that consists of six uncoupled multimode erbium-doped cores. Each core supports three spat…
High-efficiency integrated laser on erbium-doped lithium niobate-on-insulator
MOE Key Laboratory of Weak-Light Nonlinear Photonics, School of Physics and TEDA Institute of Applied Physics, Nankai University（南开大学物理学院与泰达应用物理研究院弱光非线性光子学教育部重点实验室）
We report design and subsequent fabrication of an intrinsically gain flattened Erbium doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) based on a highly asymmetrical and concentric dual-core fiber, inner core of which was only partially doped. Phase-resonant optical coupling between the two cores was so tailored through optimization of its refractive index profile parameters that the longer wavelengths within the C-band experience relatively higher amplification compared to the shorter wavelengths thereby reducing the difference in the well-known tilt in the gains between the shorter and longer wavelength regions…
We demonstrate monolithic integration of an electro-optically (EO) tunable microring laser on lithium niobate on insulator (LNOI) platform. The device is fabricated by photolithography assisted chemo-mechanical etching (PLACE), and the pump laser is evanescently coupled into the erbium (Er3+) doped LN microring laser using an undoped LN waveguide mounted above the microring. The quality factor of the LN microring resonator is measured as high as 1.54x10^5 at the wavelength of 1542 nm. Lasing action can be observed at a pump power threshold below 3.5 mW using a 980 nm continuous-wave pump laser…
We demonstrate a high power, all-fiber, tunable laser source that can operate in the L-band region. A low power, tunable input laser is amplified with a recently proposed, high efficiency, 6th order cascaded Raman amplifier. The proposed system is scalable and overcomes the limitations of Erbium and Erbium-Ytterbium co-doped fiber lasers for power scaling. A tunable Erbium-Ytterbium co-doped fiber ring laser generating ~0.5W of power and tunable in the 1560-1590 nm wavelength range is utilized as the seed source. The output from the seed laser is amplified to ~24 W using 6th order cascaded Ram…
We demonstrate a robust low-loss optical interface by tiling passive (i.e., without doping of active ions) thin film lithium niobate (TFLN) and active (i.e., doped with rare earth ions) TFLN substrates for monolithic integration of passive/active lithium niobate photonics. The tiled substrates composed of both active and passive areas allow to pattern the mask of the integrated active passive photonic device at once using a single continuous photolithography process. The interface loss of tiled substrate is measured as low as 0.26 dB. Thanks to the stability provided by this approach, a four-c…
Erbium-doped lithium niobate on insulator (LNOI) laser plays an important role in the complete photonic integrated circuits (PICs). Here, we demonstrate an integrated tunable whisper galley single mode laser (WGSML) by making use of a pair of coupled microdisk and microring on LNOI. A 974 nm single-mode pump light can have an excellent resonance in the designed microdisk, which is beneficial to the whisper gallery mode (WGM) laser generation. The WGSML at 1560.40 nm with a maximum 31.4 dB side mode suppression ratio (SMSR) has been achieved. By regulating the temperature, WGSMLs output power i…
An efficient method to fabricate transparent glass ceramic fibers containing in-situ grown Er3+-doped oxide nanoparticles is presented. Characterization of the drawn fibers exhibits low loss (0.4 dB/m) and broadened Er3+ emission spectrum. This attractive method offers new scopes for fiber amplifiers.
We demonstrate efficient pulse-energy extraction from a partly-quenched erbium-doped aluminosilicate fiber amplifier. This has a high erbium-concentration, which allows for short devices with reduced nonlinear distortions, but which also results in partial quenching and thus significant unsaturable absorption, even though the fiber is still able to amplify. Although the quenching degrades the average-power efficiency, the pulse energy remains high, and our results point to an increasingly promising outcome for short pulses. Furthermore, unlike unquenched fibers, the conversion efficiency impro…
Microcavity lasers based on erbium-doped lithium niobate on insulator (LNOI), which are key devices for LNOI integrated photonics, have attracted much attention recently. In this Letter, we report the realization of a C-band single-mode laser using Vernier effect in two coupled Erbium-doped LNOI microrings with different radii under the pump of a 980-nm continuous laser. The laser, operating stably over a large range of pumping power, has a pump threshold of ~200 μW and a side-mode suppression ratio exceeding 26 dB. The high-performance LNOI single-mode laser will promote the development of li…
We report an on-chip single mode microlaser with low-threshold fabricated on Erbium doped lithium niobate on insulator (LNOI). The single mode laser emission at 1550.5 nm wavelength is generated in a coupled photonic molecule, which is facilitated by Vernier effect when pumping the photonic molecule at 970 nm. A threshold pump power as low as 200 uW is demonstrated thanks to the high quality factor above 10^6. Moreover, the linewidth of the microlaser reaches 4 kHz, which is the best result in LNOI microlasers. Such single mode micro-laser lithographically fabricated on chip is highly in deman…
Optical fiber tapers are used to collect photoluminescence emission at ~1.5 um from photonic crystal cavities fabricated in erbium doped silicon nitride on silicon. Photoluminescence collection via fiber taper is enhanced 2.5 times relative to free space, with a total taper collection efficiency of 53%. By varying the fiber taper offset from the cavity, a broad tuning range of coupling strength is obtained. This material system combined with fiber taper collection is promising for building on-chip optical amplifiers.
Developing of new rare-earth (RE)-doped optical fibres for power amplifiers and lasers requires continuous improvements in the fibre spectroscopic properties (like shape and width of the gain curve, optical quantum efficiency, resistance to spectral hole burning and photodarkening...). Silica glass as a host material for fibres has proved to be very attractive. However, some potential applications of RE-doped fibres suffer from limitations in terms of spectroscopic properties resulting from clustering or inappropriate local environment when doped into silica. To this aim, we present a new rout…
Photolithography assisted chemo-mechanical etching (PLACE), a technique specifically developed for fabricating highquality large-scale photonic integrated circuits (PICs) on thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN), has enabled fabrication of a series of building blocks of PICs ranging from high-quality (high-Q) microresonators and low-loss waveguides to electrooptically (EO) tunable lasers and waveguide amplifiers. Aiming at high-throughput manufacturing of the PIC devices and systems, we have developed an ultra-high-speed high-resolution laser lithography fabrication system employing a high repetiti…
Erbium-Doped Fiber Amplifiers can present holes in spectral gain in Wavelength Division Multiplexing operation. The origin of this inhomogeneous saturation behavior is still a subject of controversy. In this paper we present both an experimental methods and a gain's model. Our experimental method allow us to measure the first homogeneous linewidth of the 1.5 $μ$m erbium emission with gain spectral hole burning consistently with the other measurement in the literature and the model explains the differences observed in literature between GSHB and other measurement methods.
Erbium doped materials are of great interest in optical telecommunications due to the Er3+ intra-4f emission at 1.54 ?m. Erbium doped fibre amplifiers (EDFA) were developed in silica glass because of the low losses at this wavelength and the reliability of this glass. Developments of new rare earth doped fibre amplifiers aim to control their spectroscopic properties including shape and width of the gain curve and optical quantum efficiency. Standard silica glass modifiers, such as aluminium, result in very good properties in current EDFA. However, for more drastic spectroscopic changes, more i…
Phase sensitive amplifiers (PSAs) have the potential to empower substantial advances in emerging generations of optical communication systems as well as classical and quantum on-chip signal processing. The core building block of a PSA is a nonlinear medium. While the second-order nonlinearity ($χ^{(2)}$) is stronger than the third-order nonlinearity ($χ^{(3)}$), it is used less often in semiconductors for parametric amplification owing to the challenges of effectively phase matching the interacting waves as well as two-photon absorption of the pump. In this work, we demonstrate the successful …
The goal of this report is to study the conditions for efficient THz generation using Frequency Difference Generation principle. In particular, two CW IR beams are used together with a periodically poled lithium niobate crystal in order to generate a continuous THz wave. As a source of the IR pump beams we consider a 30W (CW) IPG Er-doped fiber-amplifier which currently is the most powerful commercial amplifier on the market. The work is motivated by application of CW sources of THz waves in high bit wireless communication applications. The amplifier will allow to mix two optically modulated I…
