Confinement of hybridized light modes in nonlinear-optical superpotentials
Abstract
In this work, we present a spatial and temporal light trapping mechanism induced by coherent frequency conversion. We consider a wave-mixing process, where a pumped nonlinearity mediates a frequency-domain beamsplitter interaction between two signal modes. When these wave modes are counterpropagating, temporally trapped eigenmodes emerge at the zero of the nonlinearity profile. We establish that such spatio-temporal trapping has a direct connection to supersymmetric quantum mechanics, which ensures the existence and robustness of the trapped modes and allows us to derive analytic solutions of the bound eigenmodes. Backwards sum-frequency conversion may thus enable a unique class of active photonic memory devices, whose design parameters are compatible with the state of the art in integrated nonlinear photonics. We propose proof-of-principle experiments to study this nonlinear-optical trapping effect on thin-film lithium niobate. In addition, as a case study, we show how the temporal trap can be used alongside parametric gain. Our work unveils potential applications ranging from classical integrated photonics to multimode quantum nonlinear photonics.
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BibTeX
@misc{presutti2026confinement,
title = {{Confinement of hybridized light modes in nonlinear-optical superpotentials}},
author = {Federico Presutti and Ryotatsu Yanagimoto},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.31643},
eprint = {2610.31643},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31643},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Confinement of hybridized light modes in nonlinear-optical superpotentials
AU - Federico Presutti
AU - Ryotatsu Yanagimoto
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/22
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.31643
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31643
AB - In this work, we present a spatial and temporal light trapping mechanism induced by coherent frequency conversion. We consider a wave-mixing process, where a pumped nonlinearity mediates a frequency-domain beamsplitter interaction between two signal modes. When these wave modes are counterpropagating, temporally trapped eigenmodes emerge at the zero of the nonlinearity profile. We establish that such spatio-temporal trapping has a direct connection to supersymmetric quantum mechanics, which ensures the existence and robustness of the trapped modes and allows us to derive analytic solutions of the bound eigenmodes. Backwards sum-frequency conversion may thus enable a unique class of active photonic memory devices, whose design parameters are compatible with the state of the art in integrated nonlinear photonics. We propose proof-of-principle experiments to study this nonlinear-optical trapping effect on thin-film lithium niobate. In addition, as a case study, we show how the temporal trap can be used alongside parametric gain. Our work unveils potential applications ranging from classical integrated photonics to multimode quantum nonlinear photonics.
ER -