Recently, Nature Communications published new advances of silicon core fibre platform. The paper titled All-fibre heterogeneously-integrated frequency comb generation using silicon core fibre is jointly collaborated with Dr. Li Shen from Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics, Huazhong University of Science, Prof. Anna Peacock from University of Southampton, Prof. Zhixin Liu from University College London, and Prof. John Ballato and Prof. Ursula Gibson from Clemson University.
An optical frequency comb is a light source that generates equally-frequency-spaced optical wavelengths with a deterministic phase relationship. Originally developed for metrology (Nobel Prize in 2005), optical frequency combs are becoming increasingly pervasive in a wider range of research topics such as telecommunications, electronic devices, and medical sensing. In telecommunications, it has been shown that an optical frequency comb can significantly enhance the speed of optical communication systems as well as improve the accuracy of radio frequency signal processing. However, to harness the benefits of optical frequency combs in practical telecom applications, high performance frequency comb generators are required that are compact and robust.
The researchers have demonstrated a new frequency comb source to address these challenges. The source combines two leading edge photonic technologies - optoelectronic frequency comb generators and integrated silicon core fibres – to demonstrate a highly efficient frequency comb generator that features a broad and flat spectral response with high power and narrow comb lines, properties that are desirable for many practical applications in areas such as phase-coherent communications and micrometer/millimeter wave generation. Moreover, our cavity-free design allows for tunable wavelength and comb spacing, thus enabling high resolution real-time spectroscopy as well as electronic processing.
Fig. 1: Fully integrated SCF-based parametric comb generation scheme.
Fig. 2: C-band parametric frequency comb generation using SCF.
The paper is available as Open Access.
Sohanpal, R., Ren, H., Shen, L. et al. All-fibre heterogeneously-integrated frequency comb generation using silicon core fibre. Nat Commun 13, 3992 (2022).
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-31637-1
