Nonreciprocal Light Propagation in a Silicon Photonic Circuit
Abstract
Optical communications and computing require on-chip nonreciprocal light propagation to isolate and stabilize different chip-scale optical components. We have designed and fabricated a metallic-silicon waveguide system in which the optical potential is modulated along the length of the waveguide such that nonreciprocal light propagation is obtained on a silicon photonic chip. Nonreciprocal light transport and one-way photonic mode conversion are demonstrated at the wavelength of 1.55 micrometers in both simulations and experiments. Our system is compatible with conventional complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor processing, providing a way to chip-scale optical isolators for optical communications and computing.
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Supplementary Material
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Published In
Science
Volume 333 | Issue 6043
5 August 2011
5 August 2011
Copyright
Copyright © 2011, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Submission history
Received: 24 March 2011
Accepted: 27 June 2011
Published in print: 5 August 2011
Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments: Support by NSF and NSF ERC Center for Integrated Access Networks grant EEC-0812072, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency under the Nanoscale Architecture for Coherent Hyperoptical Sources program grant W911NF-07-1-0277, National Basic Research Program of China grant 2007CB613202, National Nature Science Foundation of China grants 50632030 and 10874080, and Nature Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province grant BK2007712. We thank Nanonics, Ltd., for extensive training and support in near-field scanning optical microscopy. M.A. acknowledges support of a Cymer Corp. graduate fellowship.
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