Tailorable Stimulated Brillouin Scattering in Nanoscale Silicon Waveguides
Abstract
While nanoscale modal confinement radically enhances a variety of nonlinear light-matter interactions within silicon waveguides, traveling-wave stimulated Brillouin scattering nonlinearities have never been observed in silicon nanophotonics. Through a new class of hybrid photonic-phononic waveguides, we demonstrate tailorable traveling-wave forward stimulated Brillouin scattering in nanophotonic silicon waveguides for the first time, yielding 3000 times stronger forward SBS responses than any previous waveguide system. Simulations reveal that a coherent combination of electrostrictive forces and radiation pressures are responsible for greatly enhanced photon-phonon coupling at nano-scales. Highly tailorable Brillouin nonlinearities are produced by engineering the structure of a membrane-suspended waveguide to yield Brillouin resonances from 1 to 18 GHz through high quality-factor (>1000) phonon modes. Such wideband and tailorable stimulated Brillouin scattering in silicon photonics could enable practical realization of on-chip slow-light devices, RF-photonic filtering and sensing, and ultra-narrow-band laser sources by using standard semiconductor fabrication and CMOS technologies.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1301.7311,
title = {Tailorable Stimulated Brillouin Scattering in Nanoscale Silicon Waveguides},
author = {Heedeuk Shin and Wenjun Qiu and Robert Jarecki and Jonathan A. Cox and Roy H. Olsson and Andrew Starbuck and Zheng Wang and Peter T. Rakich},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1301.7311},
year = {2013}
}