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A “Time Lens” for On-Chip Femtosecond Pulses
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Patricia Daukantas

Scientists have long wished for a high-quality    

ultrafast-pulse source small enough for a chip.

However, the tunable femtosecond lasers that
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provide these light pulses fit on a tabletop, not a ADVERTISEMENT

semiconductor wafer. Microresonator

frequency combs, or “microcombs,” that might
otherwise fill the bill have low efficiency and Recent Headlines
weak pulse energies.
A “Time Lens” for On-Chip Femtosecond Pulses
Now, researchers based in the United States
have integrated a femtosecond pulse source Terahertz Reveals New Insights on Perovskite
Solar Cells
onto a photonic chip made of lithium niobate, a
material with many interesting nonlinear Bruker to Acquire Neurescence
optical properties (Nature, doi: 10.1038/s41586- A time lens transforms a continuous-wave, single-color
022-05345-1). To synthesize the ultrafast pulses, laser beam into a high-performance, on-chip
the device uses a “time lens”—a temporal analog femtosecond pulse source. [Image: Second Bay
Studios/Harvard SEAS]
to a spatial optical system. The resulting source
produces trains of 520-fs pulses with energies of
0.54 pJ and a line spacing of 30 GHz.

How the time lens works

A conventional or spatial lens diffracts light and focuses light rays on a focal plane. But spatial
diffraction has a mathematical analog: temporal dispersion. Instead of a physical lens, the temporal
system takes continuous wave light from a laser chip and runs it through an amplitude modulator,
phase modulator and dispersion medium. The first element of the trio shapes the light to fit the
temporal “aperture”; the second element chirps the pulses and generates the multi-colored frequency
comb; and the third element introduces group delay dispersion (see “Ultrahigh-Speed Optical
Processing Using Space-Time Duality,” OPN, May 2011).

Instead of using tabletop components to perform the time-lens manipulations and feeding the resulting
pulses into a chip, the team led by Marko Lončar, an electrical engineering professor at Harvard
University, crammed all three elements into a 25×4-mm2 footprint on a 600-nm-thick lithium niobate
film supported by a 2-μm-thick substrate.

A bevy of potential applications

According to the researchers, the lithium niobate platform developed in the Harvard lab greatly
reduces the complexity of the circuitry needed to produce well-controlled femtosecond pulses. “You
just get better performance as the device gets smaller and more integrated,” the study’s first author,
Mengjie Yu, said in a press release. (Yu was a Harvard postdoctoral fellow at the time of the work; she
has since moved to the University of Southern California, USA.)

The researchers predict that the miniaturized femtosecond-pulse source could find a home in
applications ranging from optical clocks to lidar and astronomical spectrography. The team hopes to
explore its use in quantum networking.

Publish Date: 24 November 2022

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