Robust Integrated Optical Unitary Converter Using Multiport Directional Couplers

An integrated optical unitary converter (OUC), which can realize arbitrary N × N unitary transformation on chip, is promising for widespread applications in various areas, such as optical communication, quantum information processing, and optical neural networks. Most of the integrated OUCs demonstrated to date comprise cascaded 2 × 2 Mach-Zehnder interferometers (MZIs) based on Reck's scheme or its variation, or cascaded multimode interference (MMI) couplers based on multi-plane light conversion (MPLC). However, these schemes are sensitive to fabrication errors, making it difficult to realize high-performance large-scale OUCs. In this work, we experimentally demonstrate a silicon photonic 4 × 4 OUC that is inherently robust to fabrication errors, based on a novel structure. The proposed structure consists of cascaded multiport directional couplers (DCs) and phase shifter arrays. In this scheme, the multiport DC assures unitary transformation with inherent robustness against fabrication errors. By optimizing all the phase shifters using a simulated annealing algorithm, we experimentally demonstrate reconfigurable 4-mode demultiplexing and error-free demultiplexing of 40-Gb/s non-return-to-zero (NRZ) signals.