The integration of ferroic oxide thin films into advanced flexible electronics will bring multifunctionality beyond organic and metallic materials. However, it is challenging to achieve high flexibility in single-crystalline ferroic oxides that is considerable to organic or metallic materials. Here, we demonstrate the superior flexibility of freestanding single-crystalline BiFeO₃ membranes, which are typical multiferroic materials with multifunctionality. They can endure cyclic 180° folding and have good recoverability, with the maximum bending strain up to 5.42% during in situ bending under scanning electron microscopy, far beyond their bulk counterparts. Such superior elasticity mainly originates from reversible rhombohedral-tetragonal phase transition, as revealed by phase-field simulations. This study suggests a general fundamental mechanism for a variety of ferroic oxides to achieve high flexibility and to work as smart materials in flexible electronics.

In this work, we present a nonlinear silicon nitride waveguide. These waveguide are fabricated by readily available PECVD, conventional contact UV-lithography and high-temperature annealing techniques, thus dramatically reducing the processing complexity and cost. By patterning the waveguide structures firstly and then carrying out a high-temperature annealing process, not only sufficient waveguide thickness can be achieved, which gives more freedom to waveguide dispersion control, but also the material absorption loss in the waveguides be greatly reduced. The linear optical loss of the fabricated waveguide with a cross-section of 2.0 × 0.58 µm² was measured to be as low as 0.58 dB/cm. The same loss level is demonstrated over a broad wavelength range from 1500 nm to 1630 nm. Moreover, the nonlinear refractive index of the waveguide was determined to be ~6.94 × 10⁻¹⁹ m²/W, indicating that comparable nonlinear performance with their LPCVD counterparts is expected. These silicon nitride waveguides based on a PECVD deposition platform can be useful for the development of more complicated on-chip nonlinear optical devices or circuits.

In this paper, we propose a reference-modulated permutation index differential chaos shift keying (RM-PI-DCSK) over multipath fading channels. Due to quasi-orthogonal property between different permutated chaotic signals, the proposed scheme can remarkably suppress the inter-sequence interference to recover the desired information. Moreover, the proposed RM-PI-DCSK has one more modulation bit in the reference segment than the conventional permutation index differential chaos shift keying (PI-DCSK). Both the reference signal in the first time-slot and a permuted replica of the reference in the second time-slot are modulated for efficient transmission. The theoretical bit-error-rate (BER) performance and the highly consistent simulation results demonstrate that the proposed RM-PI-DCSK can achieve a performance gain 3 dB over the conventional PI-DCSK at a BER of $10^{-4}$ , and this gain becomes larger in a high-delay-spread channel. In particular, the performance superiority of the RM-PI-DCSK is further demonstrated in a typical ultra-wideband (UWB) channel with narrow-band interference. Therefore, this proposed scheme can be deemed as an efficient transmission alternative for chaotic-based wireless communications, such as in wireless local area network (WLAN) applications and indoor applications of the transmitted-reference UWB.

We studied the gain of Raman-assisted fiber optical parametric amplifiers (RA-FOPAs) both theoretically and experimentally. We investigated the relationship between the overall gain and different combinations of Raman and parametric pump powers using contour maps. We derived a normalized phase-matched model to determine the general behavior the peak gains of RA-FOPAs operating in the small signal region. The contour maps of the combined gain enhancement can be used to optimize both indirect and direct Raman gain of the signal/idler in RA-FOPAs. We showed that, in a given fiber, it is possible to optimize the Raman and parametric pump powers in RA-FOPAs for high gain and high efficiency.

We studied the use of multiple Raman pumps to assist fiber optical parametric amplifiers (FOPAs). We derived a theoretical model to describe the performance of multiple Raman pump assisted FOPAs. We demonstrated that the over 40 nm flat gain bandwidth provided by the multiple Raman pumps can be used to support the parametric gain bandwidth of Raman-assisted FOPAs (RA-FOPAs). We also found that if indirect Raman gain contribution dominates, by using dispersion-flattened highly nonlinear fiber with small dispersion slope and polarization-mode dispersion effect, broadband FOPA with broad parametric pump wavelength tuning range can be obtained by using multiple Raman pump assistance. On the other hand, if direct Raman gain contribution dominates, the parameters of the multiple Raman pumps have to be chosen carefully to ensure that the Raman gain bandwidth matches the parametric gain bandwidth in order to achieve a flat gain with broad gain bandwidth in the RA-FOPAs.

We present the first demonstration of visible emission from highly doped silica glass micro-ring resonators (MRRs) through a third-harmonic generation (THG) nonlinear process. We obtain green light conversion efficiency of 2.7×10⁻⁵ W⁻² in a MRR with loaded Q-factor of 1.4×10⁶ pumped in the telecom band. A thermal nonlinear model is developed to account for the in-cavity power dependence of the resonance detuning. Using the extracted thermal nonlinear coefficients, the measured TH resonance shift is calibrated by subtracting the thermal nonlinear-induced phase mismatch to obtain the theoretical threefold wavelength relationship along with the measured cubic power relationship.