Low power inelastic light scattering at small detunings in silicon wire waveguides at telecom wavelengths

Abstract

When a pump beam is propagating through a silicon nanophotonic waveguide, a very small fraction of the light is scattered to other frequencies. At very low intensity, the amount of scattered light is proportional to the power of the pump beam. We show that the scattering intensity increases linearly within the temperature range 300-575 K and that the photon flux decreases as the inverse of the frequency detuning ν over the investigated bandwidth 0.4 THz < |ν| < 2.5 THz. The simplest interpretation of these observations is that the pump beam is scattered on a 1 dimensional thermal bath of excitations. Finally, the implications of this scattering process for quantum optics applications of silicon nanophotonic structures are discussed.

11 pages, 5 figures, to submit to Journal of the Optical Society B

References in corpus (3)

• Generation of polarization entangled photon pairs and violation of Bell's inequality using spontaneous four-wave mixing in fiber loop
• Entanglement generation using silicon wire waveguide
• Four-photon scattering in birefringent fibers

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• Temperature dependence of the Kerr nonlinearity and two-photon absorption in a silicon waveguide at 1.55μm
• Evaluation of graphene optical nonlinearity with photon-pair generation in graphene-on-silicon waveguides