Pockels effect-induced strong effective Kerr nonlinearity in a lithium niobate waveguide

The utilization of Kerr nonlinearity in lithium niobate has been extensively investigated over the years. Nevertheless, the practical implementation of Kerr nonlinearity in waveguides has been constrained by the material's inherently low third-order nonlinear coefficients. Here, we present a significant advancement by demonstrating Pockels effect-induced strong effective Kerr nonlinearity in a periodically poled thin-film lithium niobate waveguide. Both effective four-wave mixing (FWM) and cascaded effective FWM processes are experimentally observed. The induced FWM process achieves a maximum output power of −8.5 dBm, spanning a wavelength spectrum of over 116.8 nm. Analysis reveals that the induced effective Kerr nonlinearity exhibits a substantial effective nonlinear refractive index n2,eff more than 2.9 × 10−15 m2/W, corresponding to an effective nonlinear refractive index enhancement factor of 1.6 × 104 relative to the intrinsic value. Moreover, a wavelength-converting experiment demonstrates a flat optic-to-optic response over a broadband radio frequency spectrum, confirming that signal integrity is well preserved after on-chip effective FWM conversion. Therefore, the demonstrated efficient and broadband Pockels effect-induced effective Kerr nonlinearity paves the way for novel applications in diverse fields, including spectroscopy, parametric amplification, quantum correlation studies, and wavelength conversion technologies.