Parametric All-Optical Modulation on Chip

Abstract: We demonstrate parametric all-optical modulation in a periodically-poled lithium niobate microring resonator on chip. It employs quantum Zeno blockade between two distinct waves, a signal and a pump, through their sum-frequency generation at a large per-photon efficiency of 8.2 MHz. With nanosecond pump pulses at 6 mW peak power, 85.7% modulation extinction is observed, marking over 30~times efficiency improvement across various previous implementations. With only 2 mW pump peak power, 43.0% modulation extinction is observed for a doubly-stronger signal at 4 mW. This demonstrates, for the first time, that optical transistors with cascadability and fan-out are possible with just parametric nonlinear optics. These results, together with inherent advantages in such photonic integrated circuits, open the door to scalable technology for all-optical and quantum information processing.