One hotspot of integrated optics is how to realize a highly integrated and high-gain on-chip amplification system in a thin film of lithium niobate on insulator (TFLNOI). Here, a low erbium-doped TFLNOI waveguide amplifier with shorter length is demonstrated using the photolithography-assisted oblique-reactive ion etching technique. A maximum net internal gain of 5.4 dB in the small-signal-gain regime is measured at the peak emission wavelength of 1531.35 nm for a waveguide length of 1.5 mm and an erbium-doped concentration of 0.1 mol. %, indicating a gain per unit length of 36 dB cm⁻¹. This work paves the way for the monolithic integration of diverse active and passive photonic components on the TFLNOI platform.

Black phosphorus (BP), with a mid-infrared (MIR) bandgap of 0.34 eV, presents itself as a promising material for MIR nonlinear optical applications. We report the realization of MIR third-harmonic generation (THG) in both BP and BP-hybrid plasmonic metasurfaces (BPM). BP exhibits a high third-order nonlinear susceptibility ( χ ( 3 ) ) exceeding 10 ⁻¹⁸ m ² /V ² in the MIR region with a maximum value of 1.55 × 10 ⁻¹⁷ m ² /V ² at 5000 nm. The BP flake achieves a THG conversion efficiency of 1.4 × 10 ⁻⁵ , surpassing that of other 2D materials by over one order of magnitude. To further enhance this nonlinear performance, a BPM is designed and fabricated to achieve a two-order-of-magnitude enhancement in THG, leading to a record conversion efficiency of 6.5 × 10 ⁻⁴ , exceeding the performance of previously reported metasurfaces by more than one order of magnitude. These findings establish BP as a promising platform for next-generation MIR nonlinear optical devices.

We report a voltage-tunable reflective gold wire grid metasurface on vanadium dioxide thin film, which consists of a metal-insulator-metal (MIM) structure. We excite surface plasmon polariton (SPP) modes on the gold surface by fabricating a one-dimensional structured gold wire grid. Joule heating of laser-induced graphene (LIG) can be controlled by the voltage at the bottom, allowing vanadium dioxide in the structure to complete the transition from the insulating state to the metallic state. The phase transition of vanadium dioxide strongly disrupts the plasmon modes excited by the gold wire grid above, thereby realizing a huge change in the reflection spectrum. This acts as a tunable metasurface optical switch with a maximum modulation depth (MD) of over 20 dB. We provide a more effective and simple method for creating tunable metasurfaces in the near-infrared band, which can allow metasurfaces to have wider applications in optical signal processing, optical storage, and holography.

The whispering-gallery-mode microcavities are important in fundamental science and practical applications, which also play an essential role in integrated photonic devices. Here, we prepared a 50 μm diameter thin film lithium niobate on insulator (TFLNOI) microdisk with a Q value of 1.88 × 10⁵ through photolithography-assisted dry-wet etching. Then, we utilize the strong thermo-optic birefringence of TFLNOI to demonstrate the second-harmonic generation (SHG) and highly temperature-tunable SHG in a TFLNOI microdisk resonator, wherein the normalized conversion efficiency of the second harmonic is 140% W⁻¹. Moreover, the tuning slope of spectral tuning is 1.68 nm K⁻¹ for a telecom-band pump. Our device shows great promise for efficient on-chip wavelength conversion to produce highly tunable coherent visible light for broad applications.

We propose a heat-reconfigurable metasurface composed of the silicon-based gold grating. The asymmetric Fano-like line shape is formed due to the mutual coupling of the local surface plasmon (LSP) in the gap between the two layers of Au gratings and the surface propagating plasmon (SPP) on the surface of the Au gratings. Then, we effectively regulate the Fano resonance by applying a bias voltage to laser-induced graphene (LIG), to generate Joule heat, so that the resonant dip of one mode of the Fano resonance can shift up to 28.5 nm. In contrast, the resonant dip of the other mode barely changes. This effectively regulates the coupling between two resonant modes in Fano resonance. Our study presents a simple and efficient method for regulating Fano-like interference in the near-infrared band.