Compact slow-light waveguide and modulator on thin-film lithium niobate platform

Abstract

Lithium niobate Mach-Zehnder modulators (MZMs) with compact footprint and fast electro-optics (EO) responses are highly demanded for the next-generation optical interconnect systems. Here, we demonstrate slow-light (SL) effect using a coupled Bragg resonator structure on the thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) platform, and an ultra-compact SL-MZM with length L of ∼370μm is also constructed. The fabricated SL waveguides show a large optical passband width of ∼8nm, an insertion loss of 2.9dB, and a maximal optical group index of 7.50, corresponding to 3.4 times as large as that of regular TFLN rib waveguide. The fabricated SL-MZM exhibits a large EO bandwidth of >50GHz in an operating wavelength band of ∼8nm as well. High-speed OOK transmissions at data rates of 64Gbit/s and 80Gbit/s are successfully achieved. To our best knowledge, it is first time to build SL waveguides and compact SL-MZMs with large EO bandwidths of >50GHz on the monolithic TFLN platform.