Dispersion engineering of high-Q silicon microresonators via thermal oxidation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to precisely control dispersion in high-Q silicon microresonators by surface oxidation, enabling tailored nonlinear optical processes with high device quality.

Contribution

It presents a novel surface-oxidation technique for dispersion engineering in silicon microresonators, enhancing both dispersion control and optical quality.

Findings

Zero-dispersion wavelength can be precisely tuned.

Optical Q factor reaches nearly one million.

Enabled parametric generation with customizable emission wavelengths.

Abstract

We propose and demonstrate a convenient and sensitive technique for precise engineering of group-velocity dispersion in high-Q silicon microresonators. By accurately controlling the surface-oxidation thickness of silicon microdisk resonators, we are able to precisely manage the zero-dispersion wavelength while simultaneously further improving the high optical quality of our devices, with the optical Q close to a million. The demonstrated dispersion management allows us to achieve parametric generation with precisely engineerable emission wavelengths, which shows great potential for application in integrated silicon nonlinear and quantum photonics.