Breaking On/Off-coupling Loss Degeneracies via Bidirectional Nonlinear Optics

Abstract

Accurate evaluation of nonlinear photonic integrated circuits requires separating input and output coupling efficiencies (i.e., $η_1$ and $η_2$), yet the conventional linear-transmission calibration method recovers only their product (i.e., $η_1\,η_2$) and therefore introduces systematic bias when inferring on-chip performance from off-chip data. We present bidirectional nonlinear optical tomography (BNOT), a direction-aware metrology that uses forward and backward pumping of complementary nonlinear probes, with process-appropriate detection, to break the ``degeneracy'' of $η_1\,η_2$ and estimate individual interface efficiencies with tight confidence intervals. The method links off-chip measurements to on-chip quantities through a compact observation model that explicitly incorporates pump fluctuations and detector noise, and it frames efficiency extraction as a joint constrained optimization. Monte Carlo studies show unbiased convergence of the estimated efficiencies to ground truth with low error across realistic operating regimes. Using these efficiency estimates to reconstruct on-chip nonlinear figures of merit yields distributions centered on the true values with reduced variance, whereas conventional ``degenerate'' calibration is biased and can substantially misestimate on-chip performance. BNOT is hardware-compatible and platform-agnostic, and provides unbiased characterization of off- and on-chip coupling efficiencies across nonlinear processes, enabling reproducible, coupling-resolved benchmarking for scalable systems in quantum optics, frequency conversion, and precision metrology.