Tailorable and broadband on-chip optical power splitter

Abstract

An on-chip optical power splitter is a key component of photonic signal processing and quantum integrated circuits and requires compactness, wideband, low insertion loss, and variable splitting ratio. However, designing an on-chip splitter with both customizable splitting ratio and wavelength independence is a big challenge. Here, we propose a tailorable and broadband optical power splitter over 100 nm with low insertion loss less than 0.3%, as well as a compact footprint, based on 1×2 interleaved tapered waveguides. The proposed scheme can design the output power ratio of transverse electric modes, lithographically, and a selection equation of a power splitting ratio is extracted to obtain the desired power ratio. Our splitter scheme is close to an impeccable on-chip optical power splitter for classical and quantum integrated photonic circuits.