Ultra-low loss piezo-optomechanical low-confinement silicon nitride platform for visible wavelength quantum photonic circuits

Abstract:Realizing photonic quantum computing at scale requires integrated circuits that combine ultra-low loss with fast, low-power, low-hysteresis, and low-crosstalk reconfiguration. These requirements are particularly challenging at visible wavelengths, where many quantum resource-state generators, including single-photon sources and quantum memories, naturally operate. Low-confinement silicon nitride waveguides offer the requisite loss performance, but conventional thermo-optic modulators dissipate significant static power, driving thermal crosstalk and precluding cryogenic operation. Visible-wavelength piezo-optomechanical circuits avoid these drawbacks, but existing demonstrations rely either on high-confinement waveguides with propagation losses of 35-100 dB/m, or on low-confinement platforms using foundry-incompatible PZT. Here we combine piezo-optomechanical actuation with a CMOS-foundry-fabricated, low-confinement silicon nitride platform, achieving 2.6 dB/m propagation loss at 780 nm, megahertz-scale modulation bandwidth, a half-wave voltage-length product of 2.8 Vm, and negligible hysteresis. We demonstrate reconfigurable Mach-Zehnder interferometers with 0.63 dB loss per spiral phase shifter, enabling deep, actively reconfigurable visible-wavelength quantum photonic circuits.

Optics (physics.optics); Quantum Physics (quant-ph)

arXiv:2603.02584 [physics.optics]

(or arXiv:2603.02584v4 [physics.optics] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.02584 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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