High-Efficiency Metamaterial-Engineered Grating Couplers for Silicon Nitride Photonics.

Silicon nitride (SiN) is an ideal candidate for the development of low-loss photonic integrated circuits. However, efficient light coupling between standard optical fibers and SiN chips remains a significant challenge. For vertical grating couplers, the lower index contrast yields a weak grating strength, which translates to long diffractive structures, limiting the coupling performance.

Impact of Wind Gust on High-Speed Characteristics of Polarization Mode Dispersion in Optical Power Ground Wire Cables.

Polarization mode dispersion is recognized as a key factor limiting optical transmission systems, particularly those fiber links that run at bit rates beyond 10 Gbps. In-line test and characterization of polarization mode dispersion are thus of critical importance to evaluate the quality of installed optical fibers that are in use for high-speed signal traffics. However, polarization-based effects in optical fibers are stochastic and quite sensitive to a range of environmental changes, including optical cable movements.

Design of narrowband Bragg spectral filters in subwavelength grating metamaterial waveguides.

Properties of reflection and transmission spectral filters based on Bragg gratings in subwavelength grating (SWG) metamaterial waveguides on silicon-on-insulator platform have been analyzed using proprietary 2D and 3D simulation tools based on Fourier modal method and the coupled-mode theory. We also demonstrate that the coupled Bloch mode theory can be advantageously applied to design of Bragg gratings in SWG waveguides. By combining different techniques, including judiciously positioning silicon loading segments within the evanescent field of the SWG waveguide and making use of its dispersion properties, it is possible to attain sub-nanometer spectral bandwidths for both reflection and transmission filters in the wavelength range of 1550 nm while keeping minimum structural features of the filters as large as 100 nm.