Abstract:

Thin film lithium niobate (TFLN) photonic integrated circuits offer several improvements over other platforms in terms of material loss, energy efficiency, and operational bandwidth, making them promising enablers for high data rate optical communication. We review our recent demonstration of quadrature phase shift keying in an ultrasmall TFLN photonic crystal-based IQ modulator. Our modulator features a footprint of 40 × 200 μm² along with quality factors approaching 10⁵ providing it with a V_π = 1.16 V [H. Larocque et al. CLEO 2023, paper STh1R.3; H. Larocque et al. arXiv:2312.16746]. We discuss an extension to and optimization of quadrature amplitude modulation encoding schemes tailored to the device’s voltage response, including the use of a deep neural network for streamlining bit error rate minimization.

Bio:

Dr. Vitullo is a Physicist at the DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory and a Fellow of the DoD Basic Research Office’s LUCI program. His research interests include quantum information science and photonic integrated circuits.