Abstract

Integrated photonics has transitioned from academic research to industrial use in datacenters and optical communications and is primarily based on the use of silicon. Triggered by the developments in nonlinear integrated photonics for Kerr frequency comb generation, silicon nitride integrated photonic circuits have emerged as an excellently suited material for nonlinear integrated photonics. Over the past decade this material platform has significantly matured, and has become today an integrated photonics platform in itself, that benefits from a visible to mid IR transparency window, high power handling, large Kerr nonlinearity - offering the potential to explore applications that are beyond those accessible with silicon. Advances in processing using the photonic damascene process¹, now allow tighly confining waveguides with losses below 3 dB/m, enabling novel applications such chipscale frequency combs², traveling wave parametric amplifiers³, Erbium amplifiers⁴, or narrow linewidth frequency agile lasers^5,6 that exhibit phase noise below state of the art fiber lasers. This talk covers the advances in this novel integrated photonic platform: from the wafer scale manufacturing challenges and principles, nonlinear properties, hybrid and heterogenous integration of lasers, as well as applications of this hybrid, nonlinear, ultra-low-loss integrated photonic platform, that cover sources from the visible to mid IR, photonic computing, LiDAR to quantum photonics. In addition ways to integrate this platform with Lithium Niobate will be reviewed allowing e.g. frequency agile ultrafast tunable lasers⁷.

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