On-chip polarization handling for silicon nanophotonic integrated circuits

摘要

Silicon-on-insulator (SOI) nanowire provides a very promising way to realize the future large-scale nano-photonic integrated circuits because of the CMOS compatibility and the ability for ultrasharp bending. The giant birefringence of SOI nanowires makes on-chip polarization handling become very important and useful for many applications, like polarization-transparent silicon photonics, coherent optical communications, and on-chip quantum photonics. In this paper, our recent work on on-chip polarization handling is reviewed and summarized, including polarization-beam splitters, polarization rotators, as well as polarization splitter rotators.