On the cover of the Pink Floyd album Dark Side of the Moon, a prism splits a
ray of light into all the colors of the rainbow. This multicolored medley,
which owes its emergence to the fact that light travels as a wave, is almost
always hiding in plain sight; a prism simply reveals that it was there. For
instance, sunlight is a mixture of many different colors of light, each
bobbing up and down with their own characteristic frequency. But taken
together the colors merge into a uniform yellowish glow.
A prism, or something like it, can also undo this splitting, mixing a
rainbow back into a single beam. Back in the late 1970s, scientists figured
out how to generate many colors of light, evenly spaced in frequency, and
mix them together—a creation that became known as a frequency comb because
of the spiky way the frequencies lined up like the teeth on a comb. They
also overlapped the crests of the different frequencies in one spot, making
the colors come together to form short pulses of light rather than one
continuous beam.
As frequency comb technology developed, scientists realized that they could
enable new laboratory developments, such as ultra-precise optical atomic
clocks, and by 2005 frequency combs had earned two scientists a share of the
Nobel Prize in physics. These days, frequency combs are finding uses in
modern technology, by helping self-driving cars to "see" and allowing
optical fibers to transmit many channels worth of information at once, among
others.
Now, a collaboration of researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) has
proposed a way to make chip-sized frequency combs ten times more efficient
by harnessing the power of topology—a field of abstract math that underlies
some of the most peculiar behaviors of modern materials. The team, led by
JQI Fellows Mohammad Hafezi and Kartik Srinivasan, as well as Yanne Chembo,
an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at UMD and a
member of the Institute for Research in Electronics and Applied Physics,
published their result recently in the journal Nature Physics.
"Topology has emerged as a new design principle in optics in the past
decade," says Hafezi, "and it has led to many intriguing new phenomena, some
with no electronic counterpart. It would be fascinating if one also finds an
application of these ideas."
Small chips that can generate a frequency comb have been around for almost
fifteen years. They are produced with the help of micro-ring
resonators—circles of material that sit atop a chip and guide light around
in a loop. These circles are usually made of a silicon compound that is 10
to 100 microns in diameter and printed directly on a circuit board.
Light can be sent into the micro-ring from an adjacent piece of silicon
compound, deposited in a straight line nearby. If the frequency of light
matches one of the natural frequencies of the resonator, the light will go
around and around thousands of times—or resonate—building up the light
intensity in the ring before leaking back out into the straight-line trace.
Circling around thousands of times gives the light many chances to interact
with the silicon (or other compound) it's traveling through. This
interaction causes other colors of light to pop up, distinct from the color
sent into the resonator. Some of those colors will also resonate, going
around and around the circle and building up power. These resonant colors
are at evenly spaced frequencies—they correspond to wavelengths of light
that are an integer fraction of the ring circumference, folding neatly into
the circle and forcing the frequencies to form the teeth of a comb. At
precisely the right input power and color, the crests of all the colors
overlap automatically, making a stable comb. The evenly spaced colors that
make up the comb come together to form a single, narrow pulse of light
circulating around the ring.
"If you tune the power and the frequency of the light going into the
resonator to be just right, magically at the output you get these pulses of
light," says Sunil Mittal, a postdoctoral researcher at JQI and the lead
author of the paper.
On-chip frequency combs allow for compact applications. For example, light
detection and ranging (LIDAR) allows self-driving cars to detect what's
around them by bouncing short pulses of light produced by a frequency comb
off its surroundings. When the pulse comes back to the car, it's compared
against another frequency comb to get an accurate map of the surroundings.
In telecommunications, combs can be used to transmit more information in one
optical fiber by writing different data onto each of the comb teeth using a
technique called wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM).
But chip-scale frequency combs also have their limitations. In one
micro-ring, the fraction of power that can be converted from the input into
a comb at the output—the mode efficiency—is fundamentally limited to only 5
percent.
Mittal, Hafezi, and their collaborators have previously pioneered a
micro-ring array with built-in topological protection, and used it to supply
single photons on demand and generate made-to-order entangled photons. They
wondered if a similar setup—a square lattice of micro-ring resonators with
extra "link" rings—could also be adapted to improve frequency comb
technology.
In this setting, the micro-rings along the outer edge of the lattice become
distinct from all the rings in the middle. Light sent into the lattice
spends most of its time along this outer edge and, due to the nature of the
topological constraints, it doesn't scatter into the center. The researchers
call this outer circle of micro-rings a super-ring.
The team hoped to find magic conditions that would form a frequency comb in
the pulses circulating around the super-ring. But this is tricky: Each of
the rings in the lattice can have its own pulse of light circling round and
round. To get one big pulse of light going around the super-ring, the pulses
within each micro-ring would have to work together, syncing up to form an
overall pulse going around the entire boundary.
Mittal and his collaborators didn't know at what frequency or power this
would happen, or if it would work at all. To figure it out, Mittal wrote
computer code to simulate how light would traverse the 12 by 12 ring
lattice. To the team's surprise, not only did they find parameters that made
the micro-ring pulses sync up into a super-ring pulse, but they also found
that the efficiency was a factor of ten higher than possible for a single
ring comb.
This improvement owes everything to the cooperation between micro-rings. The
simulation showed that the comb's teeth were spaced in accordance with the
size of individual micro-rings, or wavelengths that fold neatly around the
small circle. But if you zoomed in on any of the individual teeth, you'd see
that they were really subdivided into smaller, more finely spaced sub-teeth,
corresponding to the size of the super-ring. Simply put, the incoming light
was coupled with a few percent efficiency into each of these extra
sub-teeth, allowing the aggregate efficiency to top 50 percent.
The team is working on an experimental demonstration of this topological
frequency comb. Using simulations, they were able to single out silicon
nitride as a promising material for the micro-rings, as well as figure out
what frequency and power of light to send in. They believe constructing
their superefficient frequency comb should be within reach of current
state-of-the art experimental techniques.
If such a comb is built, it may become important to the future development
of several key technologies. The higher efficiency could benefit
applications like LIDAR in self-driving cars or compact optical clocks.
Additionally, the presence of finely spaced sub-teeth around each individual
tooth could, for example, also help add more information channels in a WDM
transmitter.
And the team hopes this is just the beginning. "There could be many
applications which we don't even know yet," says Mittal. "We hope that
there'll be much more applications and more people will be interested in
this approach."
Reference:
Sunil Mittal et al, Topological frequency combs and nested temporal
solitons, Nature Physics (2021).
DOI: 10.1038/s41567-021-01302-3
Tags:
Physics