Developing a chip-scale optical clock

Author/Creator ORCID

Date

2021-02-27

Department

Program

Citation of Original Publication

Weimin Zhou, James Cahill, Jimmy H. Ni, Andrew Deloach, Sang-Yeon Cho, Stephen Anderson, Tanvir Mahmood, Patrick Sykes, Wendy L. Sarney, and Asher C. Leff "Developing a chip-scale optical clock," Optical Engineering 60(2), 027107 (27 February 2021). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.OE.60.2.027107

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Public Domain Mark 1.0
This work was written as part of one of the author's official duties as an Employee of the United States Government and is therefore a work of the United States Government. In accordance with 17 U.S.C. 105, no copyright protection is available for such works under U.S. Law

Subjects

Abstract

We report our in-house R&D efforts of designing and developing key integrated photonic devices and technologies for a chip-scale optical oscillator and/or clock. This would provide precision sources to RF-photonic systems. It could also be the basic building block for a photonic technology to provide positioning, navigation, and timing as well as 5G networks. Recently, optical frequency comb (OFC)-based timing systems have been demonstrated for ultra-precision time transfer. Our goal is to develop a semiconductor-based, integrated photonic chip to reduce the size, weight, and power consumption, and cost of these systems. Our approach is to use a self-referenced interferometric locking circuit to provide short-term stabilization to a micro-resonator-based OFC. For long-term stabilization, we use an epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) metamaterial to design an environment-insensitive cavity/resonator, thereby enabling a chip-scale optical long-holdover clock.