Mr. Marco Moller de Freitas, a PhD candidate at UD-WiSE, and his WiSE colleagues have published a paper in Nature Communications Engineering titled “Monolithically integrated ultra-wideband photonic receiver on thin-film lithium niobate.” The work details the design, fabrication, and testing of an ultra-wideband, antenna-coupled photonic receiver monolithically integrated on thin-film lithium niobate, demonstrating efficient millimeter-wave–to-optical conversion across a broad frequency range.

A free-space data link achieves transmission rates up to 2.7 Gbps using QAM, with error vector magnitudes as low as 3%, highlighting the potential of thin-film lithium niobate for next-generation high-frequency communication systems. The paper was subsequently selected by Springer Nature for inclusion in its prestigious 2025 Editors’ Choice collection.