Optical bandgap engineering in nonlinear silicon nitride waveguides

Abstract

Silicon nitride is awell-established material for photonic devices and integrated circuits. It displays a broad transparency window spanning from the visible to the mid-IR and waveguides can be manufactured with low losses. An absence of nonlinear multi-photon absorption in the erbium lightwave communications band has enabled various nonlinear optic applications in the past decade. Silicon nitride is a dielectric material whose optical and mechanical properties strongly depend on the deposition conditions. In particular, the optical bandgap can be modified with the gas flow ratio during low-pressure chemical vapor deposition (LPCVD). Here we show that this parameter can be controlled in a highly reproducible manner, providing an approach to synthesize the nonlinear Kerr coefficient of the material. This holistic empirical study provides relevant guidelines to optimize the properties of LPCVD silicon nitride waveguides for nonlinear optics applications that rely on the Kerr effect.

References in corpus (6)

• Universal Dynamics of Kerr Frequency Comb Formation in Microresonators
• Spectral Line-by-Line Pulse Shaping of an On-Chip Microresonator Frequency Comb
• Photonic Damascene Process for Integrated High-Q Microresonator Based Nonlinear Photonics
• Efficient and low-noise single-photon-level frequency conversion interfaces using silicon nanophotonics
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Cited by in corpus (7)

• Platicon microcomb generation using laser self-injection locking
• Hybrid integrated semiconductor lasers with silicon nitride feedback circuits
• Thermo-Optic Properties of Silicon-Rich Silicon Nitride for On-chip Applications
• Low-loss integrated nanophotonic circuits with layered semiconductor materials
• Intermediate-range Casimir-Polder interaction probed by high-order slow atom diffraction
• Directional supercontinuum generation: the role of the soliton
• Stress-Dependent Optical Extinction in LPCVD Silicon Nitride Measured by Nanomechanical Photothermal Sensing