arXiv · 1301.7311
Tailorable Stimulated Brillouin Scattering in Nanoscale Silicon Waveguides
Abstract
While nanoscale modal confinement radically enhances a variety of nonlinear light-matter interactions within silicon waveguides, traveling-wave stimulated Brillouin scattering nonlinearities have never been observed in silicon nanophotonics. Through a new class of hybrid photonic-phononic waveguides, we demonstrate tailorable traveling-wave forward stimulated Brillouin scattering in nanophotonic silicon waveguides for the first time, yielding 3000 times stronger forward SBS responses than any previous waveguide system. Simulations reveal that a coherent combination of electrostrictive forces and radiation pressures are responsible for greatly enhanced photon-phonon coupling at nano-scales. Highly tailorable Brillouin nonlinearities are produced by engineering the structure of a membrane-suspended waveguide to yield Brillouin resonances from 1 to 18 GHz through high quality-factor (>1000) phonon modes. Such wideband and tailorable stimulated Brillouin scattering in silicon photonics could enable practical realization of on-chip slow-light devices, RF-photonic filtering and sensing, and ultra-narrow-band laser sources by using standard semiconductor fabrication and CMOS technologies.
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Heedeuk Shin, Wenjun Qiu, Robert Jarecki, Jonathan A. Cox, Roy H. Olsson III, Andrew Starbuck, Zheng Wang, Peter T. Rakich. 2013-01-30. Tailorable Stimulated Brillouin Scattering in Nanoscale Silicon Waveguides. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms2943
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