With the realization of faster telecommunication data rates and an
expanding interest in ultrafast chemical and physical phenomena, it has
become important to develop techniques that enable simple measurements
of optical waveforms with subpicosecond resolution.
State-of-the-art oscilloscopes with high-speed photodetectors provide
single-shot waveform measurement with 30-ps resolution. Although
multiple-shot sampling techniques can achieve few-picosecond resolution,
single-shot measurements are necessary to analyse events that are
rapidly varying in time, asynchronous, or may occur only once. Further
improvements in single-shot resolution are challenging, owing to
microelectronic bandwidth limitations. To overcome these limitations,
researchers have looked towards all-optical techniques because of the
large processing bandwidths that photonics allow. This has generated an
explosion of interest in the integration of photonics on standard
electronics platforms, which has spawned the field of silicon photonics
and promises to enable the next generation of computer processing units
and advances in high-bandwidth communications. For the success of
silicon photonics in these areas, on-chip optical signal-processing for
optical performance monitoring will prove critical. Beyond
next-generation communications, silicon-compatible ultrafast metrology
would be of great utility to many fundamental research fields, as
evident from the scientific impact that ultrafast measurement techniques
continue to make. Here, using time-to-frequency conversion
via the nonlinear process of four-wave mixing on a silicon chip, we
demonstrate a waveform measurement technology within a silicon-photonic
platform. We measure optical waveforms with 220-fs resolution over
lengths greater than 100 ps,
which represent the largest record-length-to-resolution ratio (>450)
of any single-shot-capable picosecond waveform measurement technique.
Our implementation allows for single-shot measurements and uses only
highly developed electronic and optical materials of complementary
metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS)-compatible silicon-on-insulator
technology and single-mode optical fibre. The mature
silicon-on-insulator platform and the ability to integrate electronics
with these CMOS-compatible photonics offer great promise to extend this
technology into commonplace bench-top and chip-scale instruments.
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