Journal article
Bandwidth-adaptable silicon photonic differentiator employing a slow light effect
Huazhong University of Science and Technology1
Department of Photonics Engineering, Technical University of Denmark2
Nanophotonic Devices, Department of Photonics Engineering, Technical University of Denmark3
Centre of Excellence for Silicon Photonics for Optical Communications, Centers, Technical University of Denmark4
Ultra-fast Optical Communication, Department of Photonics Engineering, Technical University of Denmark5
A photonic differentiator (DIFF) plays a crucial role in photonic circuits. Despite the fact that a DIFF having a tera-hertz bandwidth has been reported, the practical bandwidth is limited to being a bandpass response. In this Letter, we propose the concept of a bandwidth-adaptable DIFF, which exploits the slow light effect in a photonic crystal waveguide (PhCW) to overcome the inherent bandwidth limitation of current photonic DIFFs.
We fabricated a PhCW Mach-Zehnder interferometer (PhCW-MZI) on the silicon-onisolator material platform to validate our concept. Input Gaussian pulses with full width to half-maximums (FWHMs) ranging from 2.7 to 81.4 ps are accurately differentiated using our PhCW-MZI. Our all-passive scheme circumvents the bandwidth bottlenecks of previously reported photonic DIFFs and can greatly broaden the application area of photonic DIFFs. (C) 2017 Optical Society of America
| Language: | English |
|---|---|
| Year: | 2017 |
| Pages: | 1596-1599 |
| ISSN: | 15394794 and 01469592 |
| Types: | Journal article |
| DOI: | 10.1364/OL.42.001596 |
| ORCIDs: | Frandsen, Lars Hagedorn and Ding, Yunhong |
