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APL Photonics

High efficiency four wave mixing and optical bistability in amorphous silicon carbide ring resonators

Peng Fei Xing, Danhao Ma, Lionel C. Kimerling, Anu Agarwal, Dawn T. H. Tan

Published Jul 1, 2020• 41 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We demonstrate high efficiency wavelength conversion via four wave mixing in amorphous silicon carbide ring resonators with a loaded quality factor of 70 000. Owing to the high quality factor and high nonlinearity of amorphous silicon carbide, −21 dB conversion efficiency is achieved with 15 mW pump power. Moreover, the thermo-optic coefficient (TOC) of amorphous silicon carbide is measured to be 1.4 × 10−4/°C at telecommunication wavelengths. Taking advantage of the high TOC, we demonstrate optical bistability in the silicon carbide ring resonator. This work presents amorphous silicon carbide as a promising platform for applications in optical signal processing.

DOI
10.1063/5.0009692

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We demonstrate high efficiency wavelength conversion via four wave mixing in amorphous silicon carbide ring resonators with a loaded quality factor of 70 000. Owing to the high quality factor and high nonlinearity of amorphous silicon carbide, −21 dB conversion efficiency is achieved with 15 mW pump power. Moreover, the thermo-optic coefficient (TOC) of amorphous silicon carbide is measured to be 1.4 × 10−4/°C at telecommunication wavelengths. Taking advantage of the high TOC, we demonstrate optical bistability in the silicon carbide ring resonator. This work presents amorphous silicon carbide as a promising platform for applications in optical signal processing.
Resonance shift and bistability in a silicon microring resonator operating at higher optical power levels pose serious difficulties, especially in nonlinear four wave mixing process. A solution of parking a laser wavelength around any of the resonances of a microring resonator and operating at any power levels is explored by integrating a microheater. We have shown with the existing theoretical model that the previous history of phase detuning in a silicon microring resonator determines the effective gain in stimulated four wave mixing process. The experimental results have been shown to be closely matching with the simulation results. For a microring resonator of radius 50 μm, an improved stimulated four wave mixing gain of ~ 11.6 dB has been observed while thermo-optically blue-shifting resonances in comparison to that of red-shifting resonances, for a launched pump power of 8.4 mW operating at a slightly off-resonant wavelength λp. The proposed technique can be used in designing actively controlled efficient photon sources in a large-scale integrated quantum photonic circuit operating at λ ~ 1550 nm.
We demonstrate low-power thermo-optic-based optical bistability in a free-standing silicon ring resonator. A bistable optical response is achieved at reduced pump powers by thermally isolating the ring resonator from its supporting substrate with an air gap. The conversion efficiency from optical power to temperature change in the silicon core is enhanced. The optical transfer function of the resulting free-standing resonator exhibits a hysteresis loop for 80 microW input optical power. Similar nonthermally isolated resonators at the same detuning do not exhibit a bistable mode for input powers less than 2 mW.
Four-wave mixing (FWM) in silicon photonics offers promising applications in optical signal processing, wavelength conversion, and quantum photonics, necessitating a comprehensive understanding of its underlying physics and limitations. Stimulated four-wave mixing in silicon photonic wire waveguides has been investigated theoretically by considering two-photon absorption, free carrier absorption, and free carrier dispersion, etc., operating near λ∼1550 nm. It has been shown that these effects severely degrade the performance when operating at higher pump power levels. We present exact numerical calculations of idler wavelength conversion efficiency and bandwidth taking into account the abovementioned nonlinearities, to show the effects of various parameters within the waveguide structure. We extended to investigate silicon photonic microring resonators in terms of the four-wave mixing performance of high-Q-value microring resonators, which are very promising as photon sources (spontaneous four-wave mixing) for large-scale quantum photonic circuits. Our analysis illustrates the limitations of analytical models in describing FWM in ring resonator behavior at a moderate input power level, necessitating a rigorous numerical approach. Experimentally, we demonstrate stimulated FWM (1525 nm≤λp≤1575 nm) in a silicon photonic wire with a cross-section of 500 nm×220 nm and with a small waveguide length of 2 mm. The idler-to-signal conversion efficiency of about −35 dB has been measured for an approximate launched pump power of 30 mW. The conversion efficiency is improved further in the microring resonator as predicted by the simulation results.
Silicon photonics has drawn a lot of attention over the last decades, mainly in telecom-related application fields where the nonlinear optical properties of silicon are ignored or minimized. However, silicon’s high χ(3) Kerr optical nonlinearity in sub-micron-scale high-confinement waveguides can enable significant improvements in traditional nonlinear devices, such as for wavelength conversion, and also enable some device applications in quantum optics or for quantum key distribution. In order to establish the viability of silicon photonics in practical applications, some big challenges are to improve the optical performance (e.g., optimize nonlinearity or minimize loss) and integration of optics with microelectronics. In this context, we discuss how electronic PIN diodes improve the performance of wavelength conversion in a microring resonator based four-wave mixing device, which achieves a continuous-wave four-wave mixing conversion efficiency of −21.3 dB at 100 mW pump power, with enough bandwidth for the wavelength conversion of a 10 Gbps signal. In the regime of quantum optics, we describe a coupled microring device that can serve as a tunable source of entangled photon pairs at telecommunications wavelengths, operating at room temperature with a low pump power requirement. By controlling either the optical pump wavelength, or the chip temperature, we show that the output bi-photon spectrum can be varied, with implications on the degree of frequency correlation of the generated quantum state.