Martino Bernard

High-frequency electro-optic measurement of strained silicon racetrack resonators

The observation of the electro-optic effect in strained silicon waveguides has been considered a direct manifestation of an induced χ(2) nonlinearity in the material. In this work, we perform high-frequency measurements on strained silicon racetrack resonators. Strain is controlled by a mechanical deformation of the waveguide. It is shown that any optical modulation vanishes, independent of the applied strain, when the applied voltage varies much faster than the carrier effective lifetime and that the DC modulation is also largely independent of the applied strain. This demonstrates that plasma carrier dispersion is responsible for the observed electro-optic effect. After normalizing out free-carrier effects, our results set an upper limit of (8±3) pm/V to the induced high-speed effective χeff,zzz(2) tensor element at an applied stress of -0.5 GPa. This upper limit is about 1 order of magnitude lower than previously reported values for static electro-optic measurements.

Intermode reactive coupling induced by waveguide-resonator interaction

We report on a joint theoretical and experimental study of an integrated photonic device consisting of a single mode waveguide vertically coupled to a disk-shaped microresonator. Starting from the general theory of open systems, we show how the presence of a neighboring waveguide induces reactive inter-mode coupling in the resonator, analogous to an off-diagonal Lamb shift from atomic physics. Observable consequences of this coupling manifest as peculiar Fano lineshapes in the waveguide transmission spectra. The theoretical predictions are validated by full vectorial 3D finite element numerical simulations and are confirmed by the experiments.

Ultra-high-Q thin-silicon nitride strip-loaded ring resonators.

We report on the design, fabrication, and characterization of thin Si3N4 ultra-high-quality (UHQ) factor ring resonators monolithically integrated on a silicon chip. The devices are based on a strip-loaded configuration and operate at both near-infrared (NIR) and third-telecom wavelengths. This approach allows us to use a guiding Si3N4 core that is one order of magnitude thinner than what has been reported in the past for obtaining similar device performances. Our strip-loaded devices benefit from the absence of physically etched lateral boundaries to show minute light scattering and, therefore, reducing significantly scattering-related losses. Consequently, UHQs of 3.7×10(6) in the NIR and high-quality factors of up to 9×10(5) in the C-band were measured for the guiding material thickness of 80 nm and 115 nm, respectively. These first results are subject to further improvements that may allow employing strip-loaded resonators in nonlinear frequency conversion or quantum computing schemes within the desired spectral range provided by the material transparency.

Homodyne Detection of Free Carrier Induced Electro-Optic Modulation in Strained Silicon Resonators

In the last few years, strained silicon has been proposed as a potential electro-optic material, paving the way to the realization of ultrafast modulators which are compatible with the CMOS fabrication technology. The linear Pockels effect has been used for measuring the magnitude of the induced (2) components, with values reaching hundreds of pm/V. Recently, it has been shown that these values could have been overestimated due to the contribution of free carriers to the electro-optic modulation. In this work, this hypothesis is validated by a series of experimental observations, which are performed on strained silicon racetrack resonators. These are fabricated with different waveguide widths and orientations. We use a low frequency (KHz) homodyne detection technique to monitor the electro-optic response of the devices. The results indicate that the modulation strength is not dependent on the waveguide geometry or direction. A lot of anomalies are encountered in the device response, which are not compatible with a modulation mechanism of (2) origin. To this purporse, a theory based on the nonlinear injection of free carriers inside the waveguide is presented. This is able to account for all the observed anomalies.

Complete crossing of Fano resonances in an optical microcavity via nonlinear tuning

We report on the modeling, simulation, and experimental demonstration of complete mode crossings of Fano resonances within chip-integrated microresonators. The continuous reshaping of resonant line shapes is achieved via nonlinear thermo-optical tuning when the cavity-coupled optical pump is partially absorbed by the material. The locally generated heat then produces a thermal field, which influences the spatially overlapping optical modes, allowing us to alter the relative spectral separation of resonances. Furthermore, we exploit such tunability to continuously probe the coupling between different families of quasi-degenerate modes that exhibit asymmetric Fano interactions. As a particular case, we demonstrate a complete disappearance of one of the modal features in the transmission spectrum as predicted by Fano [Phys. Rev.124, 1866 (1961)PHRVAO0031-899X10.1103/PhysRev.124.1866]. The phenomenon is modeled as a third-order nonlinearity with a spatial distribution that depends on the stored optical field and thermal diffusion within the resonator. The performed nonlinear numerical simulations are in excellent agreement with the experimental results, which confirm the validity of the developed theory.

Stimulated degenerate four-wave mixing in Si nanocrystal waveguides

Parametric frequency conversion via four-wave mixing (FWM) in silicon nanocrystal (Si NC) waveguides is observed at 1550 nm. To investigate the role of Si NC, different types of waveguides containing Si NC in a SiO2 matrix were fabricated. Owing to the increase of the dipole oscillator strength mediated by the quantum confinement effect, the non-linear refractive index () of Si NCs is found to be more than one order of magnitude larger than the one of bulk Si. Coupled differential equations for the degenerate FWM process taking into account the role of Si NC were numerically solved to model the experimental data. The modeling yields an effective for Si NCs in SiO2 waveguides which is similar to the one of Si waveguides. We also measured a large signal to idler conversion bandwidth of ~22 nm. The large non-linear refractive index is joined with a large two photon absorption coefficient which makes the use of Si NC in non-linear optical devices mostly suitable for mid-infrared applications.

Permanent mitigation of loss in ultrathin SOI high-Q resonators using UV light

In this paper, we demonstrate strip-loaded guiding optical components realized on a 27 nm ultra-thin SOI platform. The absence of physically etched boundaries within the guiding core suppresses majorly the scattering loss, as shown by us previously for a silicon nitride (Si

Tuning the strain-induced resonance shift in silicon racetrack resonators by their orientation

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Intermodal four wave mixing in silicon waveguides for on-chip wavelength conversion and generation (Conference Presentation)

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Broad wavelength generation and conversion with multi modal Four Wave Mixing in silicon waveguides

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