Luhua Xu

Slow light in mass-produced, dispersion-engineered photonic crystal ring resonators

We present experimental results of photonic crystal ring resonators (PhCRRs) fabricated on the CMOS-compatible, silicon-on-insulator platform via 193-nm deep-UV lithography. Our dispersion-engineering design approach is compared to experimental results, showing very good agreement between theory and measurements. Specifically, we report a mean photonic band-edge wavelength of 1546.2 ± 5.8 nm, a 0.2% variation from our targeted band-edge wavelength of 1550 nm. Methods for the direct calculation of the experimental, discrete dispersion relation and extraction of intrinsic quality factors for a highly-dispersive resonator are discussed. A maximum intrinsic quality factor of ≈83,800 is reported, substantiating our design method and indicating that high-throughput optical lithography is a viable candidate for PhCRR fabrication. Finally, through comparison of the mean intrinsic quality and slowdown factors of the PhCRRs and standard ring resonators, we present evidence of an increase in light-matter interaction strength with simultaneous preservation of microcavity lifetimes.

Broadband sub-wavelength grating coupler for O-band application

We demonstrate a broadband sub-wavelength grating coupler for the O-band application, which has a simulated coupling efficiency of −3.3 dB with 3-dB bandwidth of 78 nm and a measured coupling efficiency of −4.5 dB with a 3-dB bandwidth of 65 nm for fundamental TE mode.

Compact single-etched sub-wavelength grating couplers for O-band application

We demonstrate two single-etched sub-wavelength grating coupler (SWGC) designs for O-band application, one targeting at high coupling efficiency and the other targeting at broad operating bandwidth. The high-efficiency SWGC has a measured peak coupling efficiency of -3.8 dB and a 3-dB bandwidth of 40 nm, and the broadband SWGC has a measured peak coupling efficiency of -4.3 dB and a 3-dB bandwidth of 71 nm. Focusing gratings have been used in our SWGCs to reduce the design footprints and the dimensions of our SWGCs are smaller than 45 μm × 24 μm. The back reflections of our SWGCs are suppressed to be below -15 dB over the wavelength range from 1260 nm to 1360 nm.