Compact and scalable polarimetric self-coherent receiver using dielectric metasurface

Abstract: The polarimetric self-coherent system using a direct-detection-based Stokes-vector receiver (SVR) is a promising technology to meet both the cost and capacity requirements of the short-reach optical interconnects. However, conventional SVRs require a number of optical components to detect the state of polarization at high speed, resulting in substantially more complicated receiver configurations compared with the current intensity-modulation-direct-detection (IMDD) counterparts. Here, we demonstrate a simple and compact polarimetric self-coherent receiver based on a thin dielectric metasurface and a photodetector array (PDA). With a single 1.05-$\mu$m-thick metasurface device fabricated on a compact silicon-on-quartz chip, we implement functionalities of all the necessary passive components: a 1$\times$3 splitter, three polarization beam splitters with different polarization bases, and six focusing lenses. Combined with a high-speed PDA, we demonstrate self-coherent transmission of 20-GBd 16-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (16QAM) and 50-GBd quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK) signals over a 25-km single-mode fiber. Owing to the surface-normal configuration, it can easily be scaled to receive spatially multiplexed channels from a multicore fiber or a fiber bundle, enabling compact and low-cost receiver modules for the future highly parallelized self-coherent systems.