Laser transfer and retrieval via nanophotonic supercontinuum process

Abstract: The nature of optical metrology is to perform efficient transfer and precise retrieval for lasers and optical signals, which is beneficial for a variety of applications ranging from optical clocking, spectroscopy, to telecommunications and quantum optics. While efforts have been made to promote the detection accuracy of optical frequencies, retrieval on optical waveforms remains on the autocorrelation scheme with limited performances. Here, we demonstrate a novel scheme for optical metrology, particularly on direct retrieval of optical waveform in terms of the field amplitude profile. The scheme is based on massive four-wave-mixings underlying a nanophotonic supercontinuum process, which enables arbitrary transfer of an additive laser to modulational sidebands of the broadened continuum. Detection of the transferred signals is then flexible to be within the whole span of the supercontinuum from visible to the mid-infrared range. We demonstrate such a transfer scheme for both CW lasers and pulsed lasers. For the latter, the temporal amplitude profile of the optical wave can be retrieved, which reveals high-order dynamics of solitary pulses including the self-steepening, self-compression, and the soliton splitting, and shows a remarkable square-fold increase of signal-to-noise ratio in the power spectrum. Our results may contribute to advance optical metrology particularly towards chip scale optical waveform detection, and more fundamentally, they reveal insights of massive ultrafast nonlinear interactions underlying the soliton-based supercontinuum process.