Enhanced four-wave-mixing and 3rd order optical nonlinearity in SiN nanowires integrated with graphene oxide films

Layered 2D graphene oxide (GO) films are integrated with silicon nitride (SiN) waveguides to experimentally demonstrate an enhanced Kerr nonlinearity via four wave mixing (FWM). Owing to the strong light matter interaction between the SiN waveguides and the highly nonlinear GO films, the FWM performance of the hybrid waveguides is significantly improved. SiN waveguides with both uniformly coated and patterned GO films are fabricated based on a transfer free, layer by layer GO coating method together with standard photolithography and lift off processes, yielding precise control of the film thickness, placement and coating length. Detailed FWM measurements are carried out for the fabricated devices with different numbers of GO layers and at different pump powers. By optimizing the trade off between the nonlinearity and loss, we obtain a significant improvement in the FWM conversion efficiency of 7.3 dB for a uniformly coated device with 1 layer of GO and 9.1 dB for a patterned device with 5 layers of GO. We also obtain a significant increase in FWM bandwidth for the patterned devices. A detailed analysis of the influence of pattern length and position on the FWM performance is performed. Based on the FWM measurements, the dependence of GOs third-order nonlinearity on layer number and pump power is also extracted, revealing interesting physical insights about the 2D layered GO films. Finally, we obtain an enhancement in the effective nonlinear parameter of the hybrid waveguides by over a factor of 100. These results verify the enhanced nonlinear optical performance of SiN waveguides achievable by incorporating 2D layered GO films.