This work reports on the fabrication and optimization of silicon microring resonators on SOI platforms with a focus on rapid device prototyping. Such resonators are instrumental in expanding the functionality of photonic circuits, be it by leveraging the inherent nonlinearities of silicon or by improving frequency filtering. Central to this investigation is the detailed fabrication techniques developed for SOI waveguides, specifically tailored to minimize losses. Devices are created using Electron Beam Lithography and are etched using Reactive Ion Etching. The performance of microrings with single-mode waveguides is compared with that of multimode variants, and it is shown that the latter mitigate the impact of sidewall roughness, thereby reducing scattering losses. Through optimization of the patterning parameters, etching recipes and thermal treatment, developed devices exhibit propagation losses as low as 0.28dB/cm and Q factors in the vicinity of 2×105.
Second-order nonlinearity can be demonstrated in popular CMOS materials such as silicon and silicon nitride by breaking the centrosymmetry of their crystalline structure. We present a detailed theoretical investigation of the electric field-induced second harmonic generation (EFISH) in silicon nitride waveguide. Up-and-down frequency-conversion operations are achieved through the periodic spatial distribution of metal electrodes around the waveguides, which induces an effective second-order nonlinearity and high-efficiency SHG. We use a computational model to numerically simulate the EFISH process inside the waveguide and calculate the charge carriers responsible for the electric field creation. The SHG efficiency is massively dependent on both the waveguide dimensions and the electric field creation. We obtain second-order electric susceptibility (χ(2)) up to 0.1735 pm/V with spectral bandwidth of around 4 nm.
Within the last decade, research and development in the field of silicon microring resonators have been accelerated due to their potential in a wide range of applications. In this study, we experimentally characterize the selfpulsing dynamics in active silicon ring cavities under the effects of varying the optical power, detuning, and free-carrier lifetime. Self-pulsing is measured by coupling a single laser source into the microring resonator’s input port. The light collected from the output grating is fiber coupled and sent to a photodetector, oscilloscope, power meter, and optical spectrum analyzer (OSA) for both time and frequency domain measurement.
We demonstrate both second harmonic generation (with a normalized efficiency of 0.20 %W−1 cm−2 ) and, to our knowledge, the first degenerate χ (2) optical parametric amplifier (with an estimated normalized gain of 0.6 dBW−1/2 cm−1 ) using silicon-on-insulator waveguides fabricated in a CMOS-compatible commercial foundry.
Subwavelength grating (SWG) metamaterial structures are excellent platforms for guided-wave nonlinear optics, but their design and optimization are challenging due to the large number of geometric degrees of freedom and the need for compute-intensive 3D simulations. Here, we demonstrate inverse design of χ(2) SWG waveguides using an efficient and accurate differentiable plane-wave expansion (PWE) eigensolver. Our solver, which incorporates sparse iterative algorithms and subpixel smoothing, enables efficient eigensolution and end-to-end differentiation from geometric parameters to the SWG figure of merit, which depends both on the eigenvalues (first-order perturbation theory) and the eigenvectors and group indices (second-order perturbation theory), both in forward- and reverse-mode. We apply this solver to the design and optimization of metamaterial waveguides for two types of backward SHG: idler-reversed and pump-reversed. This approach may find use in designing periodic structures more generally, including nanobeam cavities, slow-light modulators, and vertically coupled resonators.
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