Compact on-chip power splitter based on topological photonic crystal

Abstract

We propose and demonstrate an on-chip 1×N power splitter based on topological photonic crystal (TPC) on a monolithic silicon photonic platform. Benefiting from the valley-locked propagation mode at the interface of TPCs with different topological phases, the proposed power splitter has negligible backscattering around the sharp bendings and good robustness to fabrication defects, which therefore enable lower insertion loss, better uniformity, and more compact footprint than the conventional designs. For the fabricated 1 × 2 (8) power splitter, the uniformity among the output ports is below 0.35 (0.65) dB and the maximum insertion loss is 0.38 (0.58) dB with compact footprint of 5 × 5 µm2 (10 × 12 µm2) within a bandwidth of 70 nm. In addition, the topological power splitter only requires simple configurations of TPCs with different topological phases, which is more reliable in design and fabrication compared with the conventional designs.