Low-loss silicon platform for broadband mid-infrared photonics

By Steven A. Miller, Mengjie Yu, Xingchen Ji, Austin G. Griffith, J. Cardenas, Alexander Gaeta, Michal Lipson. 2017

172 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Broadband mid-infrared (mid-IR) spectroscopy applications could greatly benefit from today’s well-developed, highly scalable silicon photonics technology; however, this platform lacks broadband transparency because of its reliance on absorptive silicon dioxide cladding. Alternative cladding materials have been studied, but the challenge lies in decreasing losses while avoiding complex fabrication techniques. Here, in contrast to traditional assumptions, we show that silicon photonics can achieve low-loss propagation in the mid-IR from 3 to 6 μm wavelength, thus providing a highly scalable, well-developed technology in this spectral range. We engineer the waveguide cross-section and optical mode interaction with the absorptive cladding oxide to reduce loss at mid-IR wavelengths. We fabricate a microring resonator and measure an intrinsic quality (Q) factor of 106 at wavelengths from 3.5 to 3.8 μm. This is the highest Q demonstrated on an integrated mid-IR platform to date. With this high-Q silicon microresonator, we also demonstrate a low optical parametric oscillation threshold of 5.2 mW, illustrating the utility of this platform for nonlinear chip-scale applications in the mid-IR.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/aa3b1f52f88f660982d43c5f2cb474ea315c7302

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Germanium-based integrated photonics from near- to mid-infrared applications (2018, unknown): “However, different strategies have appeared recently such as a proper design of SOI waveguide to limit the overlap of the optical mode with the lower silicon dioxide cladding [78].”
Mid-infrared octave spanning supercontinuum generation to 8.5 μm in silicon-germanium waveguides (2018, background): “It is comparable to the recently inferred loss propagation in an Si microring [28].”
Mid-infrared integrated photonics on silicon: a perspective (2017, background): “This is evident from Figure 2, which plots the simulated absorption losses in SOI waveguides with and without oxide top cladding and of two different core dimensions [9].”