Zelaya Kevin, Markowitz Matthew, Miri Mohammad-Ali
Department of Physics, Queens College of the City University of New York, Queens, NY, 11367, USA.
Physics Program, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, NY, 10016, USA.
Sci Rep. 2024 May 13;14(1):10950. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-60700-8.
Programmable photonic integrated circuits represent an emerging technology that amalgamates photonics and electronics, paving the way for light-based information processing at high speeds and low power consumption. Programmable photonics provides a flexible platform that can be reconfigured to perform multiple tasks, thereby holding great promise for revolutionizing future optical networks and quantum computing systems. Over the past decade, there has been constant progress in developing several different architectures for realizing programmable photonic circuits that allow for realizing arbitrary discrete unitary operations with light. Here, we systematically investigate a general family of photonic circuits for realizing arbitrary unitaries based on a simple architecture that interlaces a fixed intervening layer with programmable phase shifter layers. We introduce a criterion for the intervening operator that guarantees the universality of this architecture for representing arbitrary unitary operators with phase layers. We explore this criterion for different photonic components, including photonic waveguide lattices and meshes of directional couplers, which allows the identification of several families of photonic components that can serve as the intervening layers in the interlacing architecture. Our findings pave the way for efficiently designing and realizing novel families of programmable photonic integrated circuits for multipurpose analog information processing.
可编程光子集成电路是一种新兴技术，它融合了光子学和电子学，为高速、低功耗的光基信息处理铺平了道路。可编程光子学提供了一个灵活的平台，可以重新配置以执行多种任务，从而为彻底改变未来的光网络和量子计算系统带来了巨大希望。在过去十年中，在开发几种不同的架构以实现可编程光子电路方面取得了不断的进展，这些电路能够用光实现任意离散酉运算。在这里，我们基于一种简单的架构系统地研究了一类用于实现任意酉运算的光子电路，该架构将一个固定的中间层与可编程移相器层交织在一起。我们为中间算子引入了一个准则，该准则保证了这种架构对于用相位层表示任意酉算子的通用性。我们针对不同的光子组件探索了这个准则，包括光子波导晶格和定向耦合器网格，这使得能够识别出几类可以用作交织架构中中间层的光子组件。我们的研究结果为高效设计和实现用于多用途模拟信息处理的新型可编程光子集成电路系列铺平了道路。
