Nonlinear optical phenomena in silicon waveguides: modeling and applications.

By Qiang Lin, Oskar J. Painter, Govind P. Agrawal. Optics Express, 2007

855 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Focus Serial: Frontiers of Nonlinear Optics Several kinds of nonlinear optical effects have been observed in recent years using silicon waveguides, and their device applications are attracting considerable attention. In this review, we provide a unified theoretical platform that not only can be used for understanding the underlying physics but should also provide guidance toward new and useful applications. We begin with a description of the third-order nonlinearity of silicon and consider the tensorial nature of both the electronic and Raman contributions. The generation of free carriers through two-photon absorption and their impact on various nonlinear phenomena is included fully within the theory presented here. We derive a general propagation equation in the frequency domain and show how it leads to a generalized nonlinear Schrodinger equation when it is converted to the time domain. We use this equation to study propagation of ultrashort optical pulses in the presence of self-phase modulation and show the possibility of soliton formation and supercontinuum generation. The nonlinear phenomena of cross-phase modulation and stimulated Raman scattering are discussed next with emphasis on the impact of free carriers on Raman amplification and lasing. We also consider the four-wave mixing process for both continuous-wave and pulsed pumping and discuss the conditions under which parametric amplification and wavelength conversion can be realized with net gain in the telecommunication band.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/27019b0b4157bfd526b0faba673dc955a9054f2e

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Citations in the corpus

Nonlinear silicon photonics (2010, background): “Nonlinear effects in silicon There are a plethora of nonlinearities in silico”
Non-Invasive On-Chip Light Observation by Contactless Waveguide Conductivity Monitoring (2014, positive): “Photocarrier generation by TPA increases quadratically with the local optical power P [43] Δ N = τ eﬀ β T P A 2 hν where τ eﬀ is the carrier recombination time, β T P A is the TPA co-efﬁcient, h ν is the photon energy and A eﬀ the waveguide effective area.”
Ten years of nonlinear optics in photonic crystal fibre (2009, background): “The study of nonlinear propagation in these new waveguides is also of interest from a theoretical perspective and is stimulating research into developing new and more general nonlinear propagation model”
Mid-infrared Suspended Membrane Waveguide and Ring Resonator on Silicon-on-Insulator (2012, background): “Although pulsed pumping and reverse-biased carrier sweep-out technology can reduce the free-carrier density and absorption loss, TPA still has a negative influence on signal quality, switching speed, and energy conversion efficiency [4], [5].”
Light propagation and localization in modulated photonic lattices and waveguides (2011, background): “On the other hand, the tremendous progress in the field of nanotechnology made possible fabrication of photonic nanowaveguides with subwavelength dimensions less than 100 nm [259,66,148].”
Green light emission in silicon through slow-light enhanced third-harmonic generation in photonic-crystal waveguides (2009, background): “However, although nonlinear optical processes have been widely demonstrated in silicon nanowire”
Nonlinear Group IV photonics based on silicon and germanium: from near-infrared to mid-infrared (2014, result): “Note that the sign before the imaginary unit is different from that in [27] to be consistent with the expression of the Fourier transform that we used.”