Abstract:

Thin-film lithium niobate has shown promise for scalable applications ranging from single-photon sources to high-bandwidth data communication systems.
Realization of the next generation high-performance classical and quantum devices, however, requires much lower optical losses than the current state of the art (~10 million). Unfortunately, material limitations of ion-sliced thin film lithium niobate have not been explored, and therefore it is unclear how high quality factor  can be achieved in this platform. Here we evaluate the material limited quality factor of thin film lithium niobate photonic platform can be as high as Q~10⁸ at telecommunication wavelengths, corresponding to a propagation loss of 0.2 dB/m.