Growth of Aluminum Nitride on a Silicon Nitride Substrate for Hybrid Photonic Circuits

Abstract

Aluminum nitride (AlN) is an emerging material for integrated quantum photonics with its excellent linear and nonlinear optical properties. In particular, its second-order nonlinear susceptibility ${\chi }^{(2)}$ allows single-photon generation. We have grown AlN thin films on silicon nitride via reactive DC magnetron sputtering. The thin films have been characterized using X-ray diffraction, optical reflectometry, atomic force microscopy, and scanning electron microscopy. The crystalline properties of the thin films have been improved by optimizing the nitrogen to argon ratio and the magnetron DC power of the deposition process. X-ray diffraction measurements confirm the fabrication of high-quality c-axis oriented thin films with a full width at half maximum of the rocking curves of 3.9 deg. for 300-nm-thick films. Atomic force microscopy measurements reveal a root mean square surface roughness below 1 nm. The AlN deposition on SiN allows us to fabricate hybrid photonic circuits with a new approach that avoids the challenging patterning of AlN.

References in corpus (7)

• Integrated Photonic Quantum Technologies
• Quantum circuits with many photons on a programmable nanophotonic chip
• Large-scale integration of near-indistinguishable artificial atoms in hybrid photonic circuits
• High-yield wafer-scale fabrication of ultralow-loss, dispersion-engineered silicon nitride photonic circuits
• Aluminum nitride as a new material for chip-scale optomechanics and nonlinear optics
• Second harmonic generation in phase matched aluminum nitride waveguides
• Characterization of optical quantum circuits using resonant phase shifts

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Aluminum nitride integration on silicon nitride photonic circuits: a new hybrid approach towards on-chip nonlinear optics
• Efficient optomechanical mode-shape mapping of micromechanical devices