SILICON NITRIDE DEVICES FOR NONLINEAR AND QUANTUM OPTICS APPLICATIONS
Abstract
The technology of fabricating photonic devices on silicon wafers using the well established CMOS process methodology has been under active investigation for several years. In particular, microring resonators have been shown to have several applications in telecommunications, in sensors and in nonlinear and quantum optics.
This dissertation presents theoretical details and experimental results of silicon-nitride-based microring resonators fabricated on silicon wafers. The theoretical details of optical waveguides and numerical simulations of submicron thick waveguides are discussed. Later, the fabrication details of microring resonators and the experimental results of transmission properties of these microrings are presented.
Further, the dispersion in microrings is experimentally investigated and the measured dispersion values are presented. The fabricated microring resonator with a simple coupler showed a dispersion value of –2000 ps/nm-km. A novel approach for compensating the dispersion by using a dispersive asymmetric Mach-Zehnder interferometer coupler is proposed and the corresponding microring device is fabricated. The experimental results of this scheme show the absolute value of the residual dispersion of less than 100 ps/nm-km, indicating significant dispersion compensation by our approach.