New photonic device, developed by MIT researchers, efficiently beams light into free space

(Press-News.org) CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Photonic chips use light to process data instead of electricity, enabling faster communication speeds and greater bandwidth. Most of that light typically stays on the chip, trapped in optical wires, and is difficult to transmit to the outside world in an efficient manner.

If a lot of light could be rapidly and precisely beamed off the chip, free from the confines of the wiring, it could open the door to higher-resolution displays, smaller Lidar systems, more precise 3D printers, or larger-scale quantum computers.

Now, researchers from MIT and elsewhere have developed a new class of photonic devices that enable the precise broadcasting of light from the chip into free space in a scalable way.

Their chip uses an array of microscopic structures that curl upward, resembling tiny, glowing ski jumps. The researchers can carefully control how light is emitted from thousands of these tiny structures at once.

They used this new platform to project detailed, full-color images that are roughly half the size of a grain of table salt. Used in this way, the technology could aid in the development of lightweight augmented reality glasses or compact displays.

They also demonstrated how photonic “ski jumps” could be used to precisely control quantum bits, or qubits, in a quantum computing system.

“On a chip, light travels in wires, but in our normal, free-space world, light travels wherever it wants. Interfacing between these two worlds has long been a challenge. But now, with this new platform, we can create thousands of individually controllable laser beams that can interact with the world outside the chip in a single shot,” says Henry Wen, a visiting research scientist in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) at MIT, research scientist at MITRE, and co-lead author of a paper on the new platform.

He is joined on the paper by co-lead authors Matt Saha, of MITRE; Andrew S. Greenspon, a visiting scientist in RLE and MITRE; Matthew Zimmermann, of MITRE; Matt Eichenfeld, a professor at the University of Arizona; senior author Dirk Englund, a professor in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and principal investigator in the Quantum Photonics and Artificial Intelligence Group and the RLE; as well as others at MIT, MITRE, Sandia National Laboratories, and the University of Arizona. The research appears today in Nature.

A scalable platform

This work grew out of the Quantum Moonshot Program, a collaboration between MIT, the University of Colorado at Boulder, the MITRE Corporation, and Sandia National Laboratories to develop a novel quantum computing platform using the diamond-based qubits being developed in the Englund lab.

These diamond-based qubits are controlled using laser beams, and the researchers needed a way to interact with millions of qubits at once.

“We can’t control a million laser beams, but we may need to control a million qubits. So, we needed something that can shoot laser beams into free space and scan them over a large area, kind of like firing a T-shirt gun into the crowd at a sports stadium,” Wen says.

Existing methods used to broadcast and steer light off a photonic chip typically work with only a few beams at once and can’t scale up enough to interact with millions of qubits.

To create a scalable platform, the researchers developed a new fabrication technique. Their method produces photonic chips with tiny structures that curve upward off the chip’s surface to shine laser beams into free space.

They built these tiny “ski jumps” for light by creating two-layer structures from two different materials. Each material expands differently when it cools down from the high fabrication temperatures.

The researchers designed the structures with special patterns in each layer so that, when the temperature changes, the difference in strain between the materials causes the entire structure to curve upward as it cools.

This is the same effect as in an old-fashioned thermostat, which utilizes a coil of two metallic materials that curl and uncurl based on the temperature in the room, triggering the HVAC system. “Both of these materials, silicon nitride and aluminum nitride, were separate technologies. Finding a way to put them together was really the fabrication innovation that enables the ski jumps. This wouldn’t have been possible without the pioneering contributions of Matt Eichenfield and Andrew Leenheer at Sandia National Labs,” Wen says.

On the chip, connected waveguides funnel light to the ski jump structures. The researchers use a series of modulators to rapidly and precisely control how that light is turned on and off, enabling them to project light off the chip and move it around in free space.

Painting with light

They can broadcast light in different colors and, by tweaking the frequencies of light, adjust the density of the pattern that is emitted. In this way, they can essentially paint pictures in free space using light.

“This system is so stable we don’t even need to correct for errors. The pattern stays perfectly still on its own. We just calculate what color lasers need to be on at a given time and then turn it on,” he says.

Because the individual points of light, or pixels, are so tiny, the researchers can use this platform to generate extremely high-resolution displays. For instance, with their technique, 30,000 pixels can be fit into the same area that can hold only two pixels used in smartphone displays, Wen says.

“Our platform is the ideal optical engine because our pixels are at the physical limit of how small a pixel can be,” he adds.

Beyond high-resolution displays and larger quantum computers with diamond-based qubits, the method could be used to produce Lidars that are small enough to fit on tiny robots.

It could also be utilized in 3D printing processes that fabricate objects using lasers to cure layers of resin. Because their chip generates controllable beams of light so rapidly, it could greatly increase the speed of these printing processes, allowing users to create more complex objects. 

In the future, the researchers want to scale their system up and conduct additional experiments on the yield and uniformity of the light, design a larger system to capture light from an array of photonic chips with “ski jumps,” and conduct robustness tests to see how long the devices last.

“We envision this opening the door to a new class of lab-on-chip capabilities and lithographically defined micro-opto-robotic agents,” Wen says.

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This research was funded, in part, by the MITRE Quantum Moonshot Program, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies.

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