Broadband acousto-optic modulators on Silicon Nitride

Abstract

Stress-optic modulators are emerging as a necessary building block of photonic integrated circuits tasked with controlling and manipulating classical and quantum optical systems. While photonic platforms such as lithium niobate and silicon on insulator have well developed modulator ecosystems, silicon nitride so far does not. As silicon nitride has favorable optical properties, such as ultra-low-loss and a large optical transparency window, a rich ecosystem of potential photonic integrated circuits are therefore inhibited. Here we demonstrate a traveling wave optically broadband acousto-optic spiral modulator architecture at a wavelength of 1550 nm using 90 nm thick silicon nitride waveguides and demonstrate their use in an optomechanical sensing system. The spiral weaves the light repeatedly through the acoustic field up to 38 times, factoring in the time evolution of the acoustic field during the light's transit through spirals up to 26 cm in length. These modulators avoid heterogeneous integration, release processes, complicated fabrication procedures, and modifications of the commercial foundry fabricated photonic layer stack by exploiting ultra-low-loss waveguides to enable long phonon-photon interaction lengths required for efficient modulation. The design allows for thick top oxide cladding of 4 $\mu$m such that the low loss optical properties of thin silicon nitride can be preserved, ultimately achieving a $V_{\pi }$ of 8.98 V at 704 MHz with 1.13 dB of insertion loss. Our modulators are the first optically broadband high frequency acousto-optic modulators on thin silicon nitride, and the novel architecture is accessible to any low loss photonic platform. We demonstrate an immediate use case for these devices in a high-Q optomechanical sensing system.

11 pages, 5 figures. Nat Commun (2025)

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