Achieving precision in measuring birefringence characteristics of a periodically-poled Lithium Niobate waveguide

Abstract

The refraction of light in an optical medium is not only a subject of fundamental interest, but the refractive index also plays a crucial role in applications involving integrated and non-linear optics. One such application is photon-pair generation in waveguides with second-order nonlinearity. The spectral properties of the generated photon pairs are governed by the effective group refractive indices of the interacting modes, which normally are calculated via Sellmeier’s equations for bulk crystals. However, in integrated optics, the effective group refractive indices experienced by the propagating modes can differ from those in bulk materials. Therefore, we present an accurate, in-situ measurement technique for determining the birefringence characteristics of a structure with high reflective end facets by performing a Fourier transformation of the light transmission spectrum and apply this method to a periodically-poled Lithium Niobate waveguide resonator in the telecom wavelength range. We directly predict important spectral figures of merit of the photon-pair generation process, which depend on the optical path length difference that can be resolved with a high precision of more than 16 standard deviations.