High Q Microcavities As Multifunctional Elements For Chip Scale Nonlinear And Quantum Optics

High-Q Microcavities as Multifunctional Elements for Chip-scale Nonlinear and Quantum Optics

"Optical microcavities greatly enhance the strength of light-matter interactions by confining optical modes to persistently circulate within a small volume of the device material. The utility of these systems is evidenced by their implementation in a wide variety of optical applications and fundamental studies. This dissertation focuses on the development of optical microresonators in the silicon-on-insulator platform for their application in nonlinear and quantum optics. Single-crystalline silicon microresonators are particularly well-suited for integrated nonlinear optical applications, due to their large refractive indices, large Kerr nonlinearities, high quality factor whispering-gallery modes, and narrowband Raman spectra. Furthermore, nonlinear parametric processes in silicon can be harnessed to create chip-scale quantum states of light with excellent characteristics. Moreover, the cavity-enhancement enables the generation of photon pairs with high purity and narrow spectral linewidth, as well as control over their spectro-temporal properties. Depending on the application, the photonic quantum states can be utilized as a source of entanglement or heralded to provide single photons. We elucidate the multifunctional nature of optical microresonators by investigating the creation of entangled photon pairs, heralded single photons, and indistinguishable twin photons within these devices. In each of these domains, the produced photonic quantum states are characterized and shown to exhibit features that make them best in class. Additionally, we demonstrate a new technique which can be universally applied for dispersion compensation in microresonator-based optical parametric processes. By spatially modulating the microresonator boundary, we show that individual cavity resonances can be targeted and frequency shifted to enable parametric generation. Finally, we propose and demonstrate a powerful tool for quantum optics, which is based on the creation and coherent conversion of photonic quantum states between coupled electromagnetic cavity modes. The modal coupling introduces new creation pathways to a nonlinear optical process within the device, which then quantum mechanically interfere to drive the system between states in the time domain. The coherent conversion entangles the biphotons between propagation pathways, leading to cyclically evolving path-entanglement and the manifestation of coherent oscillations in second-order temporal correlations. In turn, by tuning properties of the cavity, we are able to intrinsically manipulate the generated quantum states and their entanglement properties for the first time in a photon pair source. It is envisioned that such systems will open a route to exotic multi-photon states and higher dimensional entanglement."--Pages xi-xii.

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