Ortega-Gomez Angel, Hernández Osmery, Oña Douglas, Biurrun-Quel Carlos, Río Carlos Del, Liberal Iñigo
Department of Electrical, Electronic and Communications Engineering, Institute of Smart Cities (ISC), Pamplona 31006, Spain.
ACS Photonics. 2023 Apr 12;10(5):1240-1249. doi: 10.1021/acsphotonics.2c01675. eCollection 2023 May 17.
Wilkinson power dividers (WPDs) are a popular element in RF and microwave technologies known for providing isolation capabilities. However, the benefits that WPDs could offer to integrated photonic systems are far less studied. Here, we investigate the thermal emission from and the noise performance of silicon-on-insulator (SOI) WPDs. We find that WPDs exhibit a noiseless port, with important implications for receiving systems and absorption-based quantum state transformations. At the same time, the thermal signals exiting noisy ports exhibit nontrivial correlations, opening the possibility for noise cancellation. We analyze passive and active networks containing WPDs showing how such nontrivial correlations can prevent the amplification of the thermal noise introduced by WPDs while benefiting from their isolation capabilities. Using this insight, we propose a modified ring-resonator amplifier that improves by times the SNR in comparison with conventional traveling wave and ring-resonator amplifiers, with being the number of inputs/outputs of the WPD. We believe that our results represent an important step forward in the implementation of SOI-WPDs and their integration in complex photonic networks, particularly for mid-IR and quantum photonics applications.
威尔金森功率分配器（WPD）是射频和微波技术中一种常见的元件，以具备隔离能力而闻名。然而，WPD对集成光子系统所能提供的益处却鲜有研究。在此，我们研究绝缘体上硅（SOI）WPD的热发射和噪声性能。我们发现WPD呈现出一个无噪声端口，这对接收系统和基于吸收的量子态变换具有重要意义。同时，从有噪声端口输出的热信号表现出非平凡的相关性，为噪声消除开辟了可能性。我们分析了包含WPD的无源和有源网络，展示了这种非平凡相关性如何在受益于WPD隔离能力的同时，防止其引入的热噪声被放大。基于这一见解，我们提出了一种改进的环形谐振器放大器，与传统行波放大器和环形谐振器放大器相比，其信噪比提高了 倍，其中 为WPD的输入/输出数量。我们相信，我们的结果代表了在SOI-WPD的实现及其在复杂光子网络中的集成方面向前迈出的重要一步，特别是对于中红外和量子光子学应用而言。
