Enhanced four-wave mixing in hybrid integrated waveguides with graphene oxide

Owing to the ease of preparation as well as the tunability of its material properties, graphene oxide (GO) has become a rising star of the graphene family. In our previous work, we found that GO has an ultra-high Kerr nonlinear optical response - several orders of magnitude higher than that of silica and even silicon. Moreover, as compared with graphene, GO has much lower linear loss as well as nonlinear loss (two photon absorption (TPA)), arising from its large bandgap (2.4~3.1 eV) being more than double the photon energy in the telecommunications band. Here, we experimentally demonstrate enhanced four-wave mixing (FWM) in hybrid integrated waveguides coated with GO films. Owing to strong mode overlap between the integrated waveguides and the high Kerr nonlinearity GO films as well as low linear and nonlinear loss, we demonstrate significant enhancement in the FWM efficiency. We achieve up to ~9.5-dB enhancement in the conversion efficiency for a 1.5-cm-long waveguide with 2 layers of GO. We perform FWM measurements at different pump powers, wavelength detuning, GO film lengths and numbers of layers. The experimental results verify the effectiveness of introducing GO films into integrated photonic devices in order to enhance the performance of nonlinear optical processes.