This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5)
Objective: The objective of this program is to devise and demonstrate architectures incorporating mode-evolution based, integrated polarization splitter and rotator devices in silicon photonics, in order to enable polarization sensing and manipulation functionalities on a silicon chip.
Intellectual merit: Effects related to the polarization of light lead to significant issues in lightwave technology. One example is polarization-mode dispersion: optical pulses spread in time in a frequency- and polarization-dependent manner, leading to errors in telecommunications. While such effects can be compensated, the devices for sensing and manipulating polarizations are usually implemented in bulk optics, which limits their widespread application. Integrated devices are desirable for their strong size and cost advantages, especially if multiple devices can be integrated on a single chip to support wavelength-division multiplexing. Silicon photonics based, integrated polarization splitters and rotators enable polarization sensing, control and high speed modulation, thereby potentially offering a practical solution to compensate polarization mode dispersion, and also enable polarization multiplexing techniques, in which independent data is sent on two orthogonal polarization states to realize higher bit rate.
Broader impacts: This work has the potential for significant impact by supporting advances in high-speed communications infrastructure pervasive to the economy. If successfully developed, integrated chips capable of polarization manipulation could pave the way to practical deployment of new optical compensators addressing serious distortion effects in fiber communications and enable new concepts for optical transmission systems and networks. Two Ph.D. students will be supported and one undergraduate student will be invited to participate.
