June, 14, 2024, we will host a seminar by Professor Rachel Grange (ETH Zürich)

Lithium niobate on Insulator and Beyond: Overcoming Fabrication Challenges for Integrated and Flat Photonics
Nonlinear and electro-optic devices are present in our daily life with many applications: light sources for microsurgery, green laser pointers, or modulators for telecommunication. Most of them use bulk materials such as glass fibers or high-quality crystals, hardly integrable or scalable. Even the fast developments of thin film lithium niobate face the challenging etching of metal-oxides. Therefore, the quest for a non-centrosymmetric material system, easy to fabricate and to scale up while maintaining its functionality, is still ongoing. Here, I will present our recent advances in top-down fabrication of lithium niobate devices [1,2] and bottom-up assemblies of randomly oriented nanocrystals or sol-gel to produce nonlinear classical and quantum signals [3]
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[1] Finco, G.; Li, G.; Pohl, D.; Reig Escalé, M.; Maeder, A.; Kaufmann, F.; Grange, R. Monolithic Thin-Film Lithium Niobate Broadband Spectrometer with One Nanometre Resolution. Nat. Commun. 2024, 15 (1).

[2] Chapman, R. J.; Häusler, S.; Finco, G.; Kaufmann, F.; Grange, R. Quantum Logical Controlled-NOT Gate in a Lithium Niobate-on-Insulator Photonic Quantum Walk. Quantum Sci. Technol. 2023, 9 (1).

[3] Talts, Ü.-L.; Weigand, H. C.; Saerens, G.; Benedek, P.; Winiger, J.; Wood, V.; Leuthold, J.; Vogler-
Neuling, V.; Grange, R. Sol-Gel Barium Titanate Nanohole Array as a Nonlinear Metasurface and a Photonic Crystal. Small 2023, 19 (50).