Characterization of Thermal Cross-Talk in Programmable Photonic Processors

Sammanfattning

Universal photonic processors are an emerging technology in the field of integrated photonics and are devices capable of both analog and quantum computing. They are realized by a mesh of reconfigurable Mach-Zehnder Interferometers that use micro-heaters in order to split and recombine light. The heat produced from these heaters can spread to other parts of the chip. This causes unwanted manipulation of light in the circuit and is a phenomenon referred to as thermal cross-talk, which this thesis aims to investigate. A Python simulation was created where cross-talk was artificially produced and a compensation algorithm was effectively implemented mitigating the issue. Experiments on an 8-mode photonic processor detected a small amount of thermal cross-talk. A 2D heat simulation was created to enable estimation of cross-talk for different distances between components.