A cavity-less architecture for high-power integrated frequency combs

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Roy, Mrinmoy, Palacios, Joshua A., Roy, Shuva, Hudson, Darren D., Redondo, Andrea Blanco
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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_version_ 1866911722771578880
author Roy, Mrinmoy
Palacios, Joshua A.
Roy, Shuva
Hudson, Darren D.
Redondo, Andrea Blanco
author_facet Roy, Mrinmoy
Palacios, Joshua A.
Roy, Shuva
Hudson, Darren D.
Redondo, Andrea Blanco
contents Photonic chip-based frequency combs have emerged as a transformative platform, enabling compact, scalable, and high-performance multiwavelength sources with far-reaching impact across science and technology. Most commonly, these sources leverage the cavity enhancement of the nonlinearities to produce a spectrum of equidistant frequency lines via cascaded four-wave mixing in high-quality microresonators pumped with a continuous wave tone. While the presence of the resonator inherently enables low-power threshold operation, it also brings intrinsic limitations in efficiency, tunability, and power per line. Here, we propose and demonstrate a cavity-less approach for the generation of optical frequency combs on-chip, which relies on non-degenerate cascaded four wave mixing in dispersion engineered integrated photonic waveguides. The results presented here enable previously inaccessible regimes of pump-to-comb conversion efficiency, wide-range continuous line-spacing tunability, and power per line for coherent comb states. This work opens new research opportunities in nonlinear integrated photonics and pathways toward high-capacity optical interconnects, scalable photonic AI accelerators, and other power-constrained integrated systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_27528
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A cavity-less architecture for high-power integrated frequency combs
Roy, Mrinmoy
Palacios, Joshua A.
Roy, Shuva
Hudson, Darren D.
Redondo, Andrea Blanco
Optics
Photonic chip-based frequency combs have emerged as a transformative platform, enabling compact, scalable, and high-performance multiwavelength sources with far-reaching impact across science and technology. Most commonly, these sources leverage the cavity enhancement of the nonlinearities to produce a spectrum of equidistant frequency lines via cascaded four-wave mixing in high-quality microresonators pumped with a continuous wave tone. While the presence of the resonator inherently enables low-power threshold operation, it also brings intrinsic limitations in efficiency, tunability, and power per line. Here, we propose and demonstrate a cavity-less approach for the generation of optical frequency combs on-chip, which relies on non-degenerate cascaded four wave mixing in dispersion engineered integrated photonic waveguides. The results presented here enable previously inaccessible regimes of pump-to-comb conversion efficiency, wide-range continuous line-spacing tunability, and power per line for coherent comb states. This work opens new research opportunities in nonlinear integrated photonics and pathways toward high-capacity optical interconnects, scalable photonic AI accelerators, and other power-constrained integrated systems.
title A cavity-less architecture for high-power integrated frequency combs
topic Optics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.27528