Achieving spatiotemporal control of light at high speeds presents immense possibilities for various applications in communication, computation, metrology, and sensing. The integration of subwavelength metasurfaces and optical waveguides offers a promising approach to manipulate light across multiple degrees of freedom at high speed in compact photonic integrated circuit (PIC) devices. Here, we demonstrate a gigahertz-rate-switchable wavefront shaping by integrating metasurface, lithium niobate on insulator photonic waveguides, and electrodes within a PIC device. As proofs of concept, we showcase the generation of a focus beam with reconfigurable arbitrary polarizations, switchable focusing with lateral focal positions and focal length, orbital angular momentum light beams as well as Bessel beams. Our measurements indicate modulation speeds of up to the gigahertz rate. This integrated platform offers a versatile and efficient means of controlling the light field at high speed within a compact system, paving the way for potential applications in optical communication, computation, sensing, and imaging.

Chip-scale programmable optical signal processors are often used to flexibly manipulate the optical signals for satisfying the demands in various applications, such as lidar, radar, and artificial intelligence. Silicon photonics has unique advantages of ultra-high integration density as well as CMOS compatibility, and thus makes it possible to develop large-scale programmable optical signal processors. The challenge is the high silicon waveguides propagation losses and the high calibration complexity for all tuning elements due to the random phase errors. In this paper, we propose and demonstrate a programmable silicon photonic processor for the first time by introducing low-loss multimode photonic waveguide spirals and low-random-phase-error Mach-Zehnder switches. The present chip-scale programmable silicon photonic processor comprises a 1×4 variable power splitter based on cascaded Mach-Zehnder couplers (MZCs), four Ge/Si photodetectors, four channels of thermally-tunable optical delaylines. Each channel consists of a continuously-tuning phase shifter based on a waveguide spiral with a micro-heater and a digitally-tuning delayline realized with cascaded waveguide-spiral delaylines and MZSs for 5.68 ps time-delay step. Particularly, these waveguide spirals used here are designed to be as wide as 2 μm, enabling an ultralow propagation loss of 0.28 dB/cm. Meanwhile, these MZCs and MZSs are designed with 2-μm-wide arm waveguides, and thus the random phase errors in the MZC/MZS arms are negligible, in which case the calibration for these MZSs/MZCs becomes easy and furthermore the power consumption for compensating the phase errors can be reduced greatly. Finally, this programmable silicon photonic processor is demonstrated successfully to verify a number of distinctively different functionalities, including tunable time-delay, microwave photonic beamforming, arbitrary optical signal filtering, and arbitrary waveform generation.

微波光子学是一门融合了微波技术和光子技术的交叉学科，是研究光波和微波在媒质中的相互作用以及在光频域实现微波信号的产生、处理、传输及接收的微波光波融合系统。由于现有的微波光子系统大多由分立器件组成，在体积、功耗、稳定性、成本等方面仍有待提升，因此集成化是微波光子技术发展的必然趋势。文中探讨了微波光子集成技术面临的主要科学与技术问题，总结了该技术的发展现状和前沿研究进展，并对其未来发展前景进行了展望。

Integrated photonics is attracting considerable attention and has found many applications in both classical and quantum optics, fulfilling the requirements for the ever-growing complexity in modern optical experiments and big data communication. Femtosecond (fs) laser direct writing (FLDW) is an acknowledged technique for producing waveguides (WGs) in transparent glass that have been used to construct complex integrated photonic devices. FLDW possesses unique features, such as three-dimensional fabrication geometry, rapid prototyping, and single step fabrication, which are important for integrated communication devices and quantum photonic and astrophotonic technologies. To fully take advantage of FLDW, considerable efforts have been made to produce WGs over a large depth with low propagation loss, coupling loss, bend loss, and highly symmetrical mode field. We summarize the improved techniques as well as the mechanisms for writing high-performance WGs with controllable morphology of cross-section, highly symmetrical mode field, low loss, and high processing uniformity and efficiency, and discuss the recent progress of WGs in photonic integrated devices for communication, topological physics, quantum information processing, and astrophotonics. Prospective challenges and future research directions in this field are also pointed out.