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Despite over 40 years' development of optical logic computing, the studies have been still struggling to support more than four operands, since the high parallelism of light has not been fully leveraged blocked by the optical nonlinearity and redundant input modulation in existing methods. Here, we propose a scalable multi-input optical programmable logic array (PLA) with minimal logical input, enabled by parallel spectrum modulation. By making full use of the wavelength resource, an eight-input PLA is experimentally demonstrated, and there are 2^256 possible combinations of generated logic gates. Various complex logic fuctions, such as 8-256 decoder, 4-bit comparator, adder and multiplier are experimentally demonstrated via leveraging the PLA. The scale of PLA can be further extended by fully using the dimensions of wavelength and space. As an example, a nine-input PLA is implemented to realize the two-dimensional optical cellular automaton for the first time and perform Conway's Game of Life to simulate the evolutionary process of cells. Our work significantly alleviates the challenge of extensibility of optical logic devices, opening up new avenues for future large-scale, high-speed and energy-efficient optical digital computing.

Soliton frequency comb generation in coupled nonlinear microcavities is attractive because a coupled microcavity offers more flexibility and possibilities compared to a single nonlinear microcavity. In this paper, we investigate how an amplifying auxiliary cavity affects the bistability region of the main cavity and soliton frequency comb generation. When the auxiliary cavity has a small gain, it can partially compensate for the loss of the main cavity allowing the generation of soliton combs with a relatively low Q-factor in the main cavity. A low Q-factor microcavity would reduce the difficulty of fabrication and extend the microcavity platform to different types of materials. However, if the gain of the auxiliary cavity is too large, a frequency comb cannot be generated because the coupled nonlinear microcavity system is no longer dissipative. Our results provide a theoretical understanding and experimental guidance for the bistability region and soliton frequency comb generation in coupled nonlinear microcavities with an amplifying auxiliary cavity. The results will facilitate the development of chip-scale integrated optical frequency comb sources., Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures

The increasing amount of data exchange requires higher-capacity optical communication links. Mode division multiplexing (MDM) is considered as a promising technology to support the higher data throughput. In an MDM system, the mode generator and sorter are the backbone. However, most of the current schemes lack the programmability and universality, which makes the MDM link susceptible to the mode crosstalk and environmental disturbances. In this paper, we propose an intelligent multimode optical communication link using universal mode processing (generation and sorting) chips. The mode processor consists of a programmable 4*4 Mach Zehnder interferometer (MZI) network and can be intelligently configured to generate or sort both quasi linearly polarized (LP) modes and orbital angular momentum (OAM) modes in any desired routing state. We experimentally establish a chip-to-chip MDM communication system. The mode basis can be freely switched between four LP modes and four OAM modes. We also demonstrate the multimode optical communication capability at a data rate of 25 Gbit/s. The proposed scheme shows significant advantages in terms of universality, intelligence, programmability and resistance to mode crosstalk, environmental disturbances and fabrication errors, demonstrating that the MZI-based reconfigurable mode processor chip has great potential in long-distance chip-to-chip multimode optical communication systems.

The integration density of photonic integrated circuits has been limited by light coupling between waveguides. Traditional approaches to layout the waveguide with high density are based on refractive index engineering to suppress the light coupling between waveguides. However, these methods mostly require sophisticated and sensitive structure design, thus lack universality. Herein, we propose high-density multi-mode-multi-core integrated photonic waveguides by inserting high-loss metal strips between waveguides. We have achieved a 10-spatial-channel multi-mode-multi-core waveguide with total occupying spacing of 6.6 um. The multi-mode waveguides have a close spacing of 400 nm. The proposed scheme has high fabrication tolerance, ultra-large bandwidth and good compatibility to the complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor technology. It can be applied to any integration platform, any working waveband and any operating mode, providing a universal solution for high-density photonic circuits.

Thermo-optic microheater is indispensable in silicon photonic devices for smart and reconfigurable photonic networks. Much efforts have been made to improve the metallic microheater performance in the past decades. However, because of the metallic nature of light absorption, placing the metallic microheater very close to the waveguide for fast response is impractical and has not been done experimentally. Here, we experimentally demonstrate a metallic microheater placed very close to the waveguide based on parity-time (PT) symmetry breaking. The intrinsic high loss of metallic heater ensures the system will operate in the PT-symmetry-broken region, which guarantee the low loss of light in the silicon waveguide. Moreover, heating at a close range significantly reduces the response time. A fast response time of ~1 us is achieved without introducing extra loss. The insertion loss is only 0.1 dB for the long heater. The modulation bandwidth is 280 kHz, which is an order of magnitude improvement when compared with that of the mainstream thermo-optic phase shifters. To verify the capability of large-scale integration, a 1*8 phased array for beam steering is also demonstrated experimentally with the PT-symmetry-broken metallic heaters. Our work provides a novel design concept for low-loss fast-response optical switches with dissipative materials and offers a new approach to enhance the performance of thermo-optic phase shifters.