Ultrafast one-chip optical receiver with functional metasurface

Abstract

Abstract High-speed optical receivers are crucial in modern optical communication systems. While complex photonic integrated circuits (PICs) are widely employed to harness the full degrees of freedom (DOFs) of light for efficient data transmission, their waveguide nature inherently constrains two-dimensional spatial scaling to accommodate a large number of optical signals in parallel. Here we present a scalable optical receiver platform that fully exploits the high spatial parallelism and ultrabroad bandwidth of light, while leveraging all DOFs—intensity, phase, and polarization. Our solution integrates a thin metasurface, composed of silicon nanoposts, with ultrafast membrane photodetectors on a compact chip. The metasurface provides all the functionalities of conventional PICs for normal-incident spatially parallelized light, enabling high-speed detection of optical signals in various modulation formats, including simultaneous detection of 320-gigabit-per-second four-channel four-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM4) signals and coherent detection of 240-gigabit-per-second 64-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (64QAM) signals.