Design of asymptotically perfect linear photonic circuits
Ryan Hamerly, Saumil Bandyopadhyay, Alexander Sludds, Dirk Englund · 2022
Conventional multiport interferometers based on MZI meshes suffer from component imperfections, which limit their scaling. We introduce two new designs that overcome this limitation: a 3-splitter MZI for generic errors and a broadband MZI+Crossing design for more realistic correlated errors. These architectures, motivated by the correspondence between SU(2) and the Riemann sphere, are more error tolerant than the standard MZI mesh and support progressive self-configuration. Numerical simulations reveal orders-of-magnitude error reductions compared to the standard MZI mesh; moreover, the mesh is asymptotically perfect: the matrix error decreases with mesh size.