Four-Wave-Mixing-Based Silicon Integrated Optical Isolator with Dynamic Non-Reciprocity

Abstract

Silicon photonics technology is a promising platform for photonics devices and system integration. However, due to the time-reversal symmetry, realizing silicon integrated isolators is still challenging. In this letter, an optical isolator based on the four-wave-mixing effect on silicon photonic integrated circuit platform is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. Different from typical nonlinear optical effect-based silicon integrated isolators, which can only be operated in either forward or backward directions (but not both), the isolator proposed here can be operated in both forward and backward directions simultaneously. The fundamental dynamic reciprocity limitation is overcome by a..