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Visible continuous emission from a silica microphotonic device by third-harmonic generation

Nature Physics volume 3, pages 430–435 (2007)Cite this article

Abstract

Nonlinear harmonic generation is widely used to extend the emission wavelength of laser sources. These devices typically require high peak powers to generate sufficient nonlinear optical response. Here, we demonstrate experimentally and analyse theoretically continuous-wave, visible emission from a silica microresonator on a silicon chip by third-harmonic generation. Emission is observed with pump powers of less than 300 μW, and is verified to scale cubically with pump power. We also observe third-order sum-frequency generation and mixing of the pump with a concomitant Raman laser within the same structure, giving rise to emission of various colours. In addition to providing low-power operation, this result opens the possibility of silicon microphotonic emitters spanning all the way down to the ultraviolet and operating continuously.

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Figure 1: Experimental set-up.
Figure 2: Experimental results.
Figure 3: Observation of directional emission of the TH signal.
Figure 4: Phase matching between the infrared pump and the visible TH.
Figure 5: Experimental observation of internal modes and multicolour generation.
Figure 6: Measured spectra showing third-order sum-frequency generation where two 1,674 nm photons are summed with one 1,553 nm photon to generate emission at 542 nm.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge helpful discussions with M. Shumate, J. Scheuer and A. Yariv and support from the Caltech Lee Center and DARPA. T.C. acknowledges a fellowship from the Center for the Physics of Information at Caltech.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. California Institute of Technology, 1200 E. California Boulevard, Pasadena, California 91125, USA

    Tal Carmon & Kerry J. Vahala

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  1. Tal Carmon
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Contributions

T.C. fabricated the devices, carried out the experiments, analysed the data and derived the analytical and numerical calculations. K.J.V. supervised all aspects of this project. Both authors made contributions to the concepts demonstrated and proposed in the article.

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Correspondence to Kerry J. Vahala.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Carmon, T., Vahala, K. Visible continuous emission from a silica microphotonic device by third-harmonic generation. Nature Phys 3, 430–435 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys601

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