INTEGRATION OF CLASSICAL/NONCLASSICAL OPTICAL NONLINEARITIES WITH PHOTONIC CIRCUITS

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2023

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Abstract

Recent developments in nanofabrication have opened opportunities for strong light-matter interactions that can enhance optical nonlinearities, both classical and non-classical, for applications such as optical computing, quantum communication, and quantum computing. However, the challenge lies in integrating these optical nonlinearities efficiently and practically with fiber-based and silicon-based photonic circuits on a large scale and at low power. In this thesis, we aimed to achieve this integration of classical and quantum optical nonlinearities with fiber-based and silicon-based photonic circuits.For classical optical applications, optical bistability is a well-researched nonlinear optical phenomenon that has hysteresis in the output light intensity, resulting from two stable electromagnetic states. This can be utilized in various applications such as optical switches, memories, and differential amplifiers. However, integrating these applications on a large scale requires low-power optical nonlinearity, fast modulation speeds, and photonic designs with small footprints that are compatible with fiber optics or silicon photonic circuits. Thermo-optic devices are an effective means of producing optical bistability through thermally induced refractive index changes caused by optical absorption. The materials used must have high absorption coefficients and strong thermo-optic effects to realize low-power optical bistability. For this purpose, we choose high-density semiconductor quantum dots as the material platform and engineer nanobeam photonic crystal structures that can efficiently be coupled to an optical fiber while achieving low-power thermo-optical bistability. For applications that require non-classical nonlinearities such as quantum communication and quantum computing, single photons are promising carriers of quantum information due to their ability to propagate over long distances in optical fibers with extremely low loss. However, the efficient coupling of single photons to optical fibers is crucial for the successful transmission of quantum information. Semiconductor quantum dots that emit around telecom wavelengths have emerged as a popular choice for single photon sources due to their ability to produce bright and indistinguishable single photons, and travel long distances in fiber optics. Here, we present our advances in integrating telecom wavelength single photons from semiconductor quantum dots to optical fibers to realize efficient fiber-integrated on-demand single photon sources at telecom wavelengths. Finally, using the same methodology, we demonstrate the integration of these quantum dots with CMOS foundry-made silicon photonic circuits. The foundry chip is designed to individually tune quantum dots using the quantum confined stark shift with localized electric fields at different sections of the chip. This feature could potentially enable the tuning of multiple quantum emitters for large-scale integration of single photon sources for on-chip quantum information processing.

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