Terahertz photonic communication breaks the bottleneck of bandwidth limitation and potentially support an extremely large capacity compatible to the optical fiber, which is foreseen to serve as one of the key technologies for next-generation broadband wireless access. In the field of terahertz communication, generation of highly stable terahertz waves is the basic guarantee, and is also one of the key technical challenges. In March 2022, the research group led by Prof. Yu Xianbin collaboratively published their recent research in “Nature Communications” with researchers from DTU, UC3M, KTH, RISE, Shanghai Jiaotong University.
In this work, the research team conducts injection locking in a photonic integrated dual-wavelength light source chip based on an optical frequency comb, and realizes the generation of terahertz photonic signals with Hz-level linewidth, with tunable frequency from 0 to 1.4 THz. In addition, combining with high spectrally efficient modulation format and advanced digital signal processing techniques, the team has successfully demonstrated a single-channel energy-efficient terahertz wireless communication link with 131 Gbit/s over 10.7m in the 400 GHz band, achieving a power consumption per bit as low as 2.9E-18 J/bit/m. This work promisingly provides a technical reserve for on-chip integrated terahertz photonic communication.
Associate researcher Zhang Lu from Zhejiang University makes equal contribution as the first author. This work is supported by the National Key Research and Development Program, the National Natural Science Foundation of China and some other projects. In terms of international cooperation, the Yu’s research group has also carried out in-depth collaborations with KTH and other institutions in the fields of mid-infrared and short-distance optical interconnection, and for instance in March 2022, two Postdeadline papers were jointly presented at OFC, which is the top international conference on optical communications.
Prof. YU Xianbin's group
Paper link: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-29049-2
