Periodically poled lithium niobate on insulator (PPLNOI) offers an admirably promising platform for the advancement of nonlinear photonic integrated circuits (PICs). In this context, domain inversion engineering emerges as a key process to achieve efficient nonlinear conversion. However, periodic poling processing of thin-film lithium niobate has only been realized on the chip level, which significantly limits its applications in large-scale nonlinear photonic systems that necessitate the integration of multiple nonlinear components on a single chip with uniform performances. Here, we demonstrate a wafer-scale periodic poling technique on a 4-inch LNOI wafer with high fidelity. The reversal lengths span from 0.5 to 10.17 mm, encompassing an area of ~1 cm² with periods ranging from 4.38 to 5.51 μm. Efficient poling was achieved with a single manipulation, benefiting from the targeted grouped electrode pads and adaptable comb line widths in our experiment. As a result, domain inversion is ultimately implemented across the entire wafer with a 100% success rate and 98% high-quality rate on average, showcasing high throughput and stability, which is fundamentally scalable and highly cost-effective in contrast to traditional size-restricted chiplet-level poling. Our study holds significant promise to dramatically promote ultra-high performance to a broad spectrum of applications, including optical communications, photonic neural networks, and quantum photonics.

Sophisticated thin film growth techniques increasingly rely on the addition of a plasma component to open or widen a processing window, particularly at low temperatures. Taking advantage of continued increases in accelerator-based X-ray source brilliance, this real-time study uses X-ray Photon Correlation Spectroscopy (XPCS) to elucidate the nanoscale surface dynamics during Plasma-Enhanced Atomic Layer Deposition (PE-ALD) of an epitaxial indium nitride film. Ultrathin films are synthesized from repeated cycles of alternating self-limited surface reactions induced by temporally separated pulses of the material precursor and plasma reactant, allowing the influence of each on the evolving morphology to be examined. During the heteroepitaxial 3D growth examined here, sudden changes in the surface structure during initial film growth, consistent with numerous overlapping stress-relief events, are observed. When the film becomes continuous, the nanoscale surface morphology abruptly becomes long-lived with a correlation time spanning the period of the experiment. Throughout the growth experiment, there is a consistent repeating pattern of correlations associated with the cyclic growth process, which is modeled as transitions between different surface states. The plasma exposure does not simply freeze in a structure that is then built upon in subsequent cycles, but rather, there is considerable surface evolution during all phases of the growth cycle.

LNOI devices have emerged as prominent contributors to photonic integrated circuits (PICs), benefiting from their outstanding performance in electro-optics, acousto-optics, nonlinear optics, etc. Due to the physical properties and current etching technologies of LiNbO₃, slanted sidewalls are typically formed in LNOI waveguides, causing polarization-related mode hybridization and crosstalk. Despite the low losses achieved with fabrication advancements in LNOI, such mode hybridization and crosstalk still significantly limit the device performance by introducing polarization-related losses. In this paper, we propose a vertically etched LNOI construction. By improving the geometrical symmetry in the waveguides, vertical sidewalls could adequately mitigate mode hybridization in common waveguide cross sections. Taking tapers and bends as representatives of PIC components, we then conducted theoretical modeling and simulations, which showed that vertical etching effectively exempts devices from polarization-related mode crosstalk. This not only improves the polarization purity and input mode transmittance but also enables lower polarization-related losses within more compact structures. As a demonstration of fabrication feasibility, we innovatively proposed a two-step fabrication technique, and successfully fabricated waveguides with vertical sidewalls. Such vertical etching technology facilitates the development of next-generation high-speed modulators, nonlinear optical devices, and other advanced photonic devices with lower losses and a smaller footprint, driving further innovations in both academic research and industrial applications.

Thin‐film lithium niobate (TFLN) has emerged as a powerful platform for integrated nonlinear optics owing to its large χ ⁽²⁾ nonlinearity, tight confinement and flexible tunability. To fully excavate such superior nonlinear optical properties, domain engineering is commonly adopted to fulfill the phase matching condition of χ ⁽²⁾ processes. During the past decade, various domain engineered TFLN nonlinear optical devices have been demonstrated, showing extremely high length‐normalized nonlinear optical conversion efficiencies. However, application‐driven scenarios demand absolute energy conversion in nonlinear frequency conversion rather than length‐normalized efficiencies, but the progress has been limited by imperfect fabrication processes. In this work, we realize effective on‐chip nonlinear energy conversion by developing low‐loss and high‐quality domain engineered TFLN waveguides with long interaction length. Ion beam trimming (IBT) technique and an etching‐prior‐poling workflow are adopted for such fabrication. Optical characterization yields an overall second‐harmonic generation (SHG) efficiency of 2,590 %/W. A high pump depletion of 85.7 % is demonstrated under continuous‐wave operation, which directly reflects strong nonlinear energy conversion. These results may lead to breakthroughs in applications like classical optical frequency conversion, quantum frequency conversion, and quantum light generation.

We used the coherent grazing incidence small angle x-ray scattering technique to study the average kinetics and nanoscale dynamics during early-stage a-${\mathrm{WSi}}_2$ sputter deposition. The kinetic and dynamic properties are examined as a function of pressure, which is known to be a critical factor in determining final surface roughness. Surface growth kinetics and dynamics are characterized by time parameters extracted from the height-height structure factor and correlation functions. The roughness at a given length scale reaches a maximum before relaxing down to a steady state. The lateral length scale dependence and pressure dependence are then compared among the measured kinetics and dynamics time parameters. Surfaces grown at lower pressures are smoother, leading to longer correlation times. The time parameters to reach a dynamic steady state and a kinetic steady state show contrasting pressure dependence. A dynamic steady state is reached earlier than the kinetic steady state at high pressure. A more random deposition direction and lower kinetic energy at higher pressures can explain these phenomena, along with the hypothesis that larger nanoclusters form in vapor before arriving at the surface. A continuum model is applied to simulate the overall behavior with mixed success.

Sophisticated thin film growth techniques increasingly rely on the addition of a plasma component to open or widen a processing window, particularly at low temperatures. However, the addition of the plasma into the growth environment also complicates the surface dynamical evolution. Taking advantage of continued increases in accelerator-based X-ray source brilliance, this real-time study uses X-ray Photon Correlation Spectroscopy (XPCS) to elucidate the nanoscale surface dynamics during Plasma-Enhanced Atomic Layer Deposition (PE-ALD) of an epitaxial indium nitride film. XPCS examines the evolution of the coherent X-ray scattering speckle pattern, which is a fingerprint of the unique sample microstructure at each moment in time. In PE-ALD, ultrathin films are synthesized from repeated cycles of alternating self-limited surface reactions induced by temporally-separated pulses of material precursor and plasma reactant, allowing the influence of each on the evolving morphology to be examined. During the heteroepitaxial 3D growth examined here, sudden changes in surface structure during initial film growth, consistent with numerous overlapping stress-relief events, are observed. When the film becomes continuous, the nanoscale surface morphology abruptly becomes long-lived with correlation time spanning the period of the experiment. Throughout the growth experiment, there is a consistent repeating pattern of correlations associated with the cyclic growth process, which is modeled as transitions between different surface states. The plasma exposure does not simply freeze in a structure that is then built upon in subsequent cycles, but rather there is considerable surface evolution during all phases of the growth cycle.