Operation of high-speed silicon photonic micro-disk modulators at cryogenic temperatures

Significant progress has been made in the field of silicon photonics over the past two decades. Silicon photonics provides substantial performance advantages in many data processing and transfer applications. Until now, the benefits of active silicon photonics in cryogenic systems have remained unexplored. Here we demonstrate the operation of a high-speed, CMOS compatible silicon micro-disk modulator transmitting data at rates up to 10 Gb/s and at temperatures down to 4.8 K. This opens the door for the use of silicon photonics as an interface to low temperature, bandwidth intensive systems such as high-performance superconducting-based computing and integrated quantum optics circuits interfacing to superconducting single-photon detectors.