English

Probing material absorption and optical nonlinearity of integrated photonic materials

Optics 2022-06-20 v1

Abstract

Optical microresonators with high quality (QQ) factors are essential to a wide range of integrated photonic devices. Steady efforts have been directed towards increasing microresonator QQ factors across a variety of platforms. With success in reducing microfabrication process-related optical loss as a limitation of QQ, the ultimate attainable QQ, as determined solely by the constituent microresonator material absorption, has come into focus. Here, we report measurements of the material-limited QQ factors in several photonic material platforms. High-QQ microresonators are fabricated from thin films of SiO2_2, Si3_3N4_4, Al0.2_{0.2}Ga0.8_{0.8}As and Ta2_2O5_5. By using cavity-enhanced photothermal spectroscopy, the material-limited QQ is determined. The method simultaneously measures the Kerr nonlinearity in each material and reveals how material nonlinearity and ultimate QQ vary in a complementary fashion across photonic materials. Besides guiding microresonator design and material development in four material platforms, the results help establish performance limits in future photonic integrated systems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2111.00105,
  title  = {Probing material absorption and optical nonlinearity of integrated photonic materials},
  author = {Maodong Gao and Qi-Fan Yang and Qing-Xin Ji and Heming Wang and Lue Wu and Boqiang Shen and Junqiu Liu and Guanhao Huang and Lin Chang and Weiqiang Xie and Su-Peng Yu and Scott B. Papp and John E. Bowers and Tobias J. Kippenberg and Kerry J. Vahala},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.00105},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

Maodong Gao, Qi-Fan Yang and Qing-Xin Ji contributed equally to this work. 9 pages, 4 figures, 1 table