High-Speed Silicon Integrated Polarization Stabilizer Assisted By a Polarimeter

Integrated polarization stabilizers along with corresponding stabilizing algorithms have been investigated for years to tackle the polarization fluctuation issue in polarization dependent systems such as photonics integrated circuits and coherent optical communication systems. Here, we propose and demonstrate a novel integrated polarization stabilizer which is composed of an in-line polarimeter and two cascaded Mach-Zehnder interferometers-based polarization converter, with a footprint of 2.8 mm × 0.8 mm. Benefitting from the integrated in-line polarimeter and two controlling algorithms, namely feed-forward tracking algorithm and feedback tracking algorithm, the stabilizer can track the incoming light with arbitrary state of polarization in one-time manipulation. The whole process consumes about 30 μs, which is approaching the limitation of the response time of the adopted thermal phase shifters, making the proposed device the fastest one with thermal phase shifters on silicon photonics platform. Meanwhile, the incoming light is endlessly tracked in real time and 99% converted to horizontal linear polarized light.