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Researchers demonstrate thin-film lithium tantalate modulators fabricated using a copper Damascene process, achieving lower microwave loss, exceptional bias stability, and high-speed data transmission up to 540 Gbit/s, while enabling scalable chip-on-wafer integration with microelectronics.

A turn-key-operable hybrid integrated Pockels laser based on an external distributed Bragg waveguide grating reflector fabricated in a wafer-scale thin-film lithium niobate on insulator platform is demonstrated, with a tuning efficiency of over 550 MHz V^–1, tuning rates reaching the exahertz per second, and a high output power of 15 mW.

An optical parametric amplifier based on integrated photonic circuits fabricated using low-loss gallium phosphide-on-silicon dioxide demonstrates improved bandwidth and gain performance over state-of-the-art erbium-doped fibre amplifiers while maintaining a low noise figure.

Thermal agitation of charge carriers, known as Johnson noise, is the dominant noise in electronic circuits. Now it has also been observed as a key noise source in integrated electro-optic photonic circuits, posing challenges for future applications.

Stable and tunable integrated lasers are fundamental building blocks for applications from spectroscopy to imaging and communication. Here the authors present a narrow linewidth hybrid photonic integrated laser with low frequency noise and fast linear wavelength tuning. They then provide an efficient FMCW LIDAR demonstration.

By using Si₃N₄ photonic integrated circuits on a silicon chip, a continuous-travelling-wave parametric amplifier is shown to yield a parametric gain exceeding both on-chip propagation loss as well as fibre–chip–fibre coupling losses.

Photonic integrated systems can be harnessed for fast and efficient optical telecommunication and metrology technologies. Here the authors develop a dual-soliton microcomb technique for massively parallel coherent laser ranging that requires only a single laser and a single photoreceiver.

An integrated electro-optic frequency comb that combines microwave integrated circuits with a photonic circuit based on lithium tantalate leads to broadband operation with low power requirements.

Electro-optical photonic integrated circuits based on lithium tantalate perform as well as current state-of-the-art ones using lithium niobate but the material has the advantage of existing commercial uses in consumer electronics, easing the problem of scalability.

A pair of strongly coupled photonic microresonators shows nonlinear emergent behaviour, which can be understood by incorporating interactions in the theoretical description of nonlinear optical systems.

Lithium niobate (LN) is difficult to process via dry etching. Here, authors demonstrate the fabrication of deeply etched, tightly confining, low loss LN photonic integrated circuits with losses 4 dB/m using diamond like carbon as a hard mask.

Frequency metrology lies at the heart of precision measurement. Here, authors establish a phasecoherent frequency link across microwave, optical, and free-electron domains. This bridges electromagnetic waves and electron matter waves, advancing ultrahigh-precision electron spectroscopy.

A fully hybrid integrated erbium-doped photonic integrated waveguide laser with wide tuning of 40 nm, side-mode suppression ratio of >70 dB and output power up to 17 mW is demonstrated, achieving not only footprint reduction but also the long-anticipated fibre-laser coherence.

The intrinsic random amplitude and phase modulation of 40 distinct lines of a microresonator frequency comb operated in the modulation instability regime are used to realize massively parallel random-modulation continuous-wave light detection and ranging, without requiring any electro-optical modulator or microwave synthesizer.

Based on observations in crystalline MgF₂ and planar Si₃N₄ microresonators, scientists reveal that the existence of multiple and broad-beat notes in a Kerr-frequency comb is due to the formation dynamics of the comb itself. This work identifies the conditions requires for low-phase-noise performance and also helps to elucidate a number of yet-unexplained phenomena.

Lithium niobate plays an important role in integrated photonics, but its widespread application requires a reliable solution. Here, the authors present a wafer-scale approach to LNOI integration via wafer bonding to silicon nitride PICs.

A frequency-tunable laser based on a hybrid silicon nitride and lithium niobate integrated photonic platform has a fast tuning rate and could be used for optical ranging applications.

Superluminescent diodes, that provide a broadband spectrum are typically used in spectral domain coherence tomography. Here, the authors use chipscale silicon nitride resonators to generate soliton microcombs with a lower noise flor that could substitute the diode sources.

Nanophotonic microwave synthesizers in the X-band (10 GHz, for radar) and K-band (20 GHz, for 5G), based on integrated soliton microcombs driven by a low-noise fibre laser, link the fields of microwave photonics and integrated microcombs.

Frequency stabilized lasers are critical to precision applications including quantum, metrology, and sensing. A photonic integrated widely tunable external cavity laser and platform compatible coil resonator reference provide ultra-low linewidth and frequency noise over a record wide tuning range.

The absolute timing of the photoelectric effect has proved difficult to measure, but the delay between photon arrival at a tungsten surface and ejection of photoelectrons has now been determined.

A massively parallel coherent light detection and ranging (lidar) scheme using a soliton microcomb—a light source that emits a wide spectrum of sharp lines with equally spaced frequencies—is described.

A silicon nitride microresonator is used for coherent phase modulation of a transmission electron microscope beam, with future applications in combining high-resolution microscopy with spectroscopy, holography and metrology.

By monolithically integrating piezoelectric actuators on ultralow-loss photonic circuits, soliton microcombs—a spectrum of sharp lines over a range of optical frequencies—can be modulated at high speeds with megahertz bandwidths.

A compact, high-performance silicon photonics-based light detection and ranging system for three-dimensional imaging is developed that should be amenable to low-cost mass manufacturing

Here, the authors generate dissipative Kerr solitons with stable repetition rates and low optical power threshold. They achieve this by actively switching the bias current of injection-locked III-V semiconductor lasers and pulse-pumping crystalline and integrated microresonators with picosecond laser pulses.

Dissipative Kerr solitons are the key phenomenon underpinning the generation of broad and coherent frequency combs on a photonic chip. This work extends the notion of dissipative Kerr solitons to the case of two coupled resonators possessing an exceptional point.

Adiabatic bends are used to reduce the optical loss of waveguides for integrated optics, but quantitative analysis of their adiabaticity have not been reported. Here, racetrack microresonators with circular and Euler bends are compared quantitatively, showing that the adiabatic Euler bends can preserve low optical loss and avoid spatial mode interaction in multimode waveguides.