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Silicon carbide (SiC) recently emerged as a promising photonic and quantum material owing to its unique material properties. In this work, we carried out an exploratory investigation of the Pockels effect in high-quality-factor (high-Q) 4H-SiC microresonators and demonstrated gigahertz-level electro-optic modulation for the first time. The extracted Pockels coefficients show certain variations among 4H-SiC wafers from different manufacturers, with the magnitudes ofr₁₃andr₃₃estimated to be in the range of (0.3–0.7) pm/V and (0–0.03) pm/V, respectively.

Silicon carbide has recently emerged as a promising photonics material due to its unique properties, including possessing strong second- and third-order nonlinear coefficients and hosting various color centers that can be utilized for a wealth of quantum applications. Here, we report the design and demonstration of octave-spanning microcombs in a 4H-silicon-carbide-on-insulator platform for the first time, to our knowledge. Such broadband operation is enabled by optimized nanofabrication achieving$>1$million intrinsic quality factors in a 36-μm-radius microring resonator, and careful dispersion engineering by investigating the dispersion properties of different mode families. For example, for the fundamental transverse-electric mode whose dispersion can be tailored by simply varying the microring waveguide width, we realized a microcomb spectrum covering the wavelength range from 1100 nm to 2400 nm with an on-chip power near 120 mW. While the observed comb state is verified to be chaotic and not soliton, attaining such a large bandwidth is a crucial step towards realizing$f-2f$self-referencing. In addition, we also observed a coherent soliton-crystal state for the fundamental transverse-magnetic mode, which exhibits stronger dispersion than the fundamental transverse-electric mode and hence a narrower bandwidth.

COVID-19 has seriously threatened people’s health and well-being across the globe since it was first reported in Wuhan, China in late 2019. This study investigates the mechanism of COVID-19 transmission in different periods within and between cities in China to better understand the nature of the outbreak. We use Moran’s I, a measure of spatial autocorrelation, to examine the spatial dependency of COVID-19 and a dynamic spatial autoregressive model to explore the transmission mechanism. We find that the spatial dependency of COVID-19 decreased over time and that the transmission of the disease could be divided into three distinct stages: an eruption stage, a stabilization stage, and a declination stage. The infection rate between cities was close to one-third of the infection rate within cities at the eruption stage, while it reduced to zero at the declination stage. We also find that the infection rates within cities at the eruption stage and declination stage were similar. China’s policies for controlling the spread of the epidemic, specifically with respect to limiting inter-city mobility and implementing intra-city travel restrictions (social isolation), were most effective in reducing the viral transmission of COVID-19. The findings from this study indicate that the elimination of inter-city mobilitymore »had the largest impact on controlling disease transmission.« less