Integrated photonics on thin-film lithium niobate DI ZHU,1,* LINBO SHAO,1 MENGJIE YU,1 REBECCA CHENG,1 BORIS DESIATOV,1 C. J. XIN,1 YAOWEN HU,1 JEFFREY HOLZGRAFE,1 SOUMYA GHOSH,1 AMIRHASSAN SHAMS-ANSARI,1 ERIC PUMA,1 NEIL SINCLAIR,1,2 CHRISTIAN REIMER,3 MIAN ZHANG,3 AND MARKO LONČAR1,* 1John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, 29 Oxford Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA 2Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy, and Alliance for Quantum Technologies (AQT), California Institute of Technology, 1200 E. California Boulevard, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA 3HyperLight Corporation, 501 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA
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[email protected] Lithium niobate (LN), an outstanding and versatile material, has influenced our daily life for decades: from enabling high-speed optical communications that form the backbone of the Internet to realizing radio-frequency filtering used in our cell phones. This half-century-old material is currently embracing a revolution in thin-film LN integrated photonics. The success of manufacturing wafer-scale, high-quality, thin films of LN on insulator (LNOI), accompanied with breakthroughs in nanofabrication techniques, have made high-performance integrated nanophotonic components possible. With rapid development in the past few years, some of these thin-film LN devices, such as optical modulators and nonlinear wavelength converters, have already outperformed their legacy counterparts realized in bulk LN crystals. Furthermore, the nanophotonic integration enabled ultra-low-loss resonators in LN, which unlocked many novel applications such as optical frequency combs and quantum transducers. In this Review, we cover—from basic principles to the state of the art—the diverse aspects of integrated thin- film LN photonics, including the materials, basic passive components, and various active devices based on electro-optics, all-optical nonlinearities, and acousto-optics.