Designing a Waveguide for Integrated Photonics Applications

We design an integrated photonic circuit to perform entanglement swapping – a quantum information task – on photons. The circuit is comprised of multimode interference couplers that mimic the function of beam splitters in bulk optics. The goal is a scalable, low-loss platform enabling high-fidelity photonic interference over a distance. We simulate the theoretical device using economical computation methods. We modeled the performance using the effective index method – deconstruction of a 3-dimensional simulation into multiple 2-dimensional simulations. Our simulations using this reduced dimensional method yield a total transmission rate of 46.75% through the multimode interference coupler, with equal distribution between the two outputs. Full 3-dimensional or optimized optical software simulations are needed to fully assess performance.