UC San Diego

As silicon photonics has matured in the past decade, chip scale optics have become an enabling technology for data center, RF, high speed communication, and quantum optic devices, and the number of devices being deployed into the world has increased by orders of magnitudes. However, the limitations arising from inherent optical nonlinearities in the material and mechanisms of modulation are still problems. In the present work, we describe research done to address some of the limitations across two areas: 1) designing foundry silicon photonic resonant devices to operate at their limits of optical power and compact scalable that address wavelength selective communication needs, and 2) not-etched nor patterned thin-film lithium niobate on top of foundry silicon photonic device through hybrid integration in a scalable manner, to enable high speed (>100 GHz) and high extinction devices. The latter part of this thesis presents novel photonic circuits in which we leverage the recently developed hybrid-silicon thin-film lithium niobate platform to tune the spectral properties of quantum light generated in a monolithic chip with the hybrid material, presenting a scalable means of pushing beyond the limitations of conventional silicon photonics.