Silicon photonics articles from across Nature Portfolio

The authors demonstrate optical tweezing of microparticles and cells using an integrated optical phased array for the first time, increasing the standoff distance of integrated optical tweezers by over two orders of magnitude compared to prior work.

Researchers demonstrate the high-coherence parallelization in integrated photonics. Their high-coherence, high-power, multiwavelength light source drives a silicon photonic link with a 60 Tbit/s data rate and significantly reduces digital signal processing consumption.

A non-volatile memory with information stored in the polarization of the ferroelectric material and can be read out via capacitance and resonant wavelength.

Harnessing the large-scale integration and individual control of artificial atoms on silicon photonic circuits enables the realization of a rapidly programmable topological photonic chip that can be dynamically reconfigured to explore diverse topological phenomena.

A silicon photonics modulator design approach is proposed, in which the inductive networks and termination resistors are designed in conjunction with the optical phase shifter. A complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) silicon photonics transmitter developed with this approach achieved 112 gigabaud transmission with an energy efficiency better than 1 pJ per bit.

Topological photonics has promised new devices that are resistant to backscattering, leading to lower loss, greater nonlinearity, and smaller footprint. New research shows that in reciprocal photonic crystals, backscattering is unavoidable, implying that breaking reciprocity is essential to leveraging photonic Chern insulators.