Probing material absorption and optical nonlinearity of integrated photonic materials

Abstract

Optical microresonators with high quality ($Q$) factors are essential to a wide range of integrated photonic devices. Steady efforts have been directed towards increasing microresonator $Q$ factors across a variety of platforms. With success in reducing microfabrication process-related optical loss as a limitation of $Q$, the ultimate attainable $Q$, as determined solely by the constituent microresonator material absorption, has come into focus. Here, we report measurements of the material-limited $Q$ factors in several photonic material platforms. High-$Q$ microresonators are fabricated from thin films of SiO${}_2$, Si${}_3$N${}_4$, Al${}_{0.2}$Ga${}_{0.8}$As and Ta${}_2$O${}_5$. By using cavity-enhanced photothermal spectroscopy, the material-limited $Q$ is determined. The method simultaneously measures the Kerr nonlinearity in each material and reveals how material nonlinearity and ultimate $Q$ 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.

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

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Cited by in corpus (19)

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