3D integrated photonic nanostructures with Giant optical nonlinearity

Photonics has a major impact on technological innovations and can revolutionize the field of computing and data processing due to its high bandwidth, speed, and low power consumption.

This has already happened for data communication via fiber-optic connections, while light processing in embedded systems is still performed by electronics via power-hungry optical-electrical conversion.The future development of integrated photonics is then waiting for new integrable materials that can advance the functionality of photonic chips towards all-optical signal processing at very low light intensities.

While linear operations and parallel matrix multiplication can be efficiently performed by light, nonlinear optical functions are notoriously difficult to implement because they require a suitable medium for efficient photon-photon interaction.

Currently, there is a lack of materials with large third-order nonlinearity, high speed and easy processability and integration in 2D and 3D structures.3DnanoGiant aims to develop new nonlinear photonic materials that can be integrated into heterogeneous functional platforms or chiplets.

To this end, I will exploit the giant optical nonlinearity of liquid crystals (ten orders of magnitude larger than that of silicon), for new formulations and lithographic strategies by which the liquid crystals will be confined in a printable nano-porous polymer network.

Their 3D nanopatterning will enable the production of multidimensional hybrid nonlinear photonic devices, from all-optical 2D logic gates and ultrafast nonlinear activation functions to self-oscillating 3D photonic crystals.

In parallel, the propagation, interaction and polymerization of solitons in a 3D(+1) space will lay the foundation for a new unsupervised bottom-up 3D printing technology.

The goals of 3DnanoGiant will redefine the state-of-the-art in integrated nonlinear photonics with practical and versatile heterogeneous chip for fast and energy-efficient optical processing.