Stimulated Brillouin Scattering in integrated photonic waveguides: forces, scattering mechanisms and coupled mode analysis

TL;DR

This paper presents a unified theoretical framework for Stimulated Brillouin Scattering in integrated photonic waveguides, combining optical forces, boundary motion, and material effects to better understand and optimize nanoscale SBS devices.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive formulation that unifies radiation pressure, boundary motion, electrostriction, and photoelasticity in SBS analysis, clarifying previous ambiguities and guiding device design.

Findings

Unified treatment of SBS mechanisms including radiation pressure and boundary motion.

Clarification of edge-effects and body-forces in SBS processes.

Insights into design and fabrication of SBS-based nanoscale photonic devices.

Abstract

Recent theoretical studies of Stimulated Brillouin Scattering (SBS) in nanoscale devices have led to an intense research effort dedicated to the demonstration and application of this nonlinearity in on-chip systems. The key feature of SBS in integrated photonic waveguides is that small, high-contrast waveguides are predicted to experience powerful optical forces on the waveguide boundaries, which are predicted to further boost the SBS gain that is already expected to grow dramatically in such structures because of the higher mode confinement alone. In all recent treatments, the effect of radiation pressure is included separately from the scattering action that the acoustic field exerts on the optical field. In contrast to this, we show here that the effects of radiation pressure and motion of the waveguide boundaries are inextricably linked. Central to this insight is a new formulation of the SBS interaction that unifies the treatment of light and sound, incorporating all relevant interaction mechanisms --- radiation pressure, waveguide boundary motion, electrostriction and photoelasticity --- from a rigorous thermodynamic perspective. Our approach also clarifies important points of ambiguity in the literature, such as the nature of edge-effects with regard to electrostriction, and of body-forces with respect to radiation pressure. This new perspective on Brillouin processes leads to physical insight with implications for the design and fabrication of SBS-based nanoscale devices.