Effect of thickness variations of lithium niobate on insulator waveguide on the frequency spectrum of spontaneous parametric down-conversion

We study the effect of waveguide thickness variations on the frequency spectrum of spontaneous parametric down-conversion in the periodically-poled lithium niobate on insulator (LNOI) waveguide. We analyze several variation models and our simulation results show that thickness variations in several nanometers can induce distinct effects on the central peak of the spectrum, such as narrowing, broadening, and splitting. We also prove that the effects of positive and negative variations can be canceled and thus lead to a variation-robust feature and an ultra-broad bandwidth. Our study may promote the development of on-chip photon sources in the LNOI platform, as well as opens up a way to engineer photon frequency state.     

Localization and Steering of Light in One-Dimensional Parity-Time Symmetric Photonic Lattices

We theoretically study the propagation dynamics of input light in one-dimensional mixed linear-nonlinear photonic lattices with a complex parity-time symmetric potential. Numerical computation shows simultaneous localization and steering of the optical beam due to the asymmetric scatter and interplay between Kerr-type nonlinearity and PT symmetry. This may provide a feasible measure for manipulation light in optical communications, integrated optics and so on.