ABSTRACT
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 N times the SNR in comparison with conventional traveling wave and ring-resonator amplifiers, with N 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.
ABSTRACT
Modeling quantum interference in the presence of dissipation is a critical aspect of quantum technologies. Including dissipation into the model of a linear device enables for assessing the detrimental impact of photon loss, as well as for studying dissipation-driven quantum state transformations. However, establishing the input-output relations characterizing quantum interference at a general lossy N-port network poses important theoretical challenges. Here, we propose a general procedure based on the singular value decomposition (SVD), which allows for the efficient calculation of the input-output relations for any arbitrary lossy linear device. In addition, we show how the SVD provides an intuitive description of the principle of operation of linear optical devices. We illustrate the applicability of our method by evaluating the input-output relations of popular reciprocal and nonreciprocal lossy linear devices, including devices with singular and nilpotent scattering matrices. Our method also enables the analysis of quantum interference in large lossy networks, as we exemplify with the study of an N-port epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) hub. We expect that our procedure will motivate future research on quantum interference in complex devices, as well as the realistic modelling of photon loss in linear lossy devices.
