Mid-Infrared Cascaded Soliton Compression on CMOS-Compatible Silicon Waveguide

Compared to fiber-based equivalents, CMOS-compatible silicon-based nonlinear optical devices harness the superior features of lower operating powers, precise dispersion control and extensive transparency range. In this article, we propose a scheme of cascaded soliton compression on CMOS-compatible Silicon Nanophotonic Wire Waveguides in the mid-infrared region which includes the wavelength of 2.0 μm and 2.8 μm. Thanks to the cascaded pulse compression mechanism, we demonstrate the large compression factor on an integrated chip-scale waveguide. We can realize a high degree pulse compression that the pulse width decreases from 1 ps to 24.0 fs with a high compression factor of 41.7 and a low operating peak power of 1.56 W at 2.0 μm. In addition, even as the wavelength migrate to 2.8 μm, our scheme is equally effective. We achieve 31.9 compression factor of 1 ps chirp-free higher-order soliton pulse which can be compressed to 31.3 fs with a small initial peak power of 4.87 W. This research indicates the potential of dispersion engineering waveguides for mid-infrared low-power applications, such as ultrafast integrated lasers, chip-scale frequency-comb generation, minimally invasive skin surgeries and molecular spectroscopy.