On-Chip High-Speed Coherent Optical Signal Detection Based on Photonic Spin-Hall Effect

The use of coherent optical signal processing in long-distance optical communication systems has dramatically increased data capacity enabling encoding of multiple-bit information in the phase of a light beam. Direct detection of phase information of a high-speed modulated light remains challenging and requires an external, local oscillator for referencing, which is expensive for short-reach optical communications, for example, in data centers. The availability of less-complex integrated photonics devices for coherent signal detection will alleviate this bottleneck. On the other hand, phase information of coherent, orthogonally polarized light beams can be extracted from their polarization states, and it is, therefore, possible to achieve phase measurements via fast polarization detection. Here, an on-chip nanodisk device is demonstrated for high-speed coherent optical signal detection enabled by spin-orbit coupling in Si-photonics circuitry. In a coherent communication experiment with up to 32 GBaud rate, the high-speed phase-shift keying and quadrature amplitude modulation signals detected by a Si nanodisk based polarization measurements at multiple wavelengths in the C-band are recovered with a bit error rate below the forward error correction threshold. The proposed on-chip nanodisk device shows promise in high-speed coherent optical communication applications where phase detection is required at low cost and small footprint.