Component-wise testing of laser-written integrated coupled-mode beam splitters.
Guan J., Menssen AJ., Liu X., Wang J., Booth MJ.
Photonic integrated circuits (PICs) are important enabling technologies for the developments of areas such as quantum information processing (QIP). Coupled-mode integrated beam splitters (IBS) are widely used in many PICs, so direct and accurate testing of individual IBSs inside a PIC is increasingly desirable, as the development of PICs for QIP is scaled up. Here we demonstrate a solution for component-wise testing of coupled-mode IBSs without limitations on component location and PIC architectures. The method is based on the imaging of an individual IBS with a custom-built multifunctional adaptive optical microscope, combined with the calculation of its beam-splitting ratio through numerical modelling.