High Extinction Ratio Thermo-Optic Switch On Thin Film Lithium Niobate With Fast Rise Times

Lithium niobate-on-insulator(LNOI)is a promising platform for integrated photonics due to its exceptional material properties, such as a large transparency window, high second order nonlinearity, and thermo- and electro-optic effects. These properties make LNOI an ideal candidate for generating and manipulating quantum states on a single chip [1]. One of the key building blocks for controlling dual-rail encoded photonic qubits is the Mach-Zehnder Interferometer (MZI) switch, which is composed of two 3 dB directional couplers and a phase shift element (see Fig. 1(a) and (b)).