Universal light-guiding geometry for high-nonlinear resonators having molecular-scale roughness

TL;DR

This paper introduces a universal fabrication method for high-Q optical resonators with molecular-scale surface roughness, enabling the use of high-nonlinearity materials like chalcogenide glasses for advanced on-chip photonics.

Contribution

A novel deposition-based technique to create high-Q resonators with ultra-smooth surfaces from any high-vacuum-depositable material, demonstrated with high-nonlinearity chalcogenide glass.

Findings

Achieved a Q-factor of 14.4 million in the resonator.

Demonstrated lasing with a threshold of 0.53 mW, 100 times lower than previous records.

Validated the method with high-nonlinearity As₂S₃ material.

Abstract

By providing an effective way to leverage nonlinear phenomena in chip-scale, high-Q optical resonators have induced the recent advances of on-chip photonics represented by micro-combs and ultra-narrow linewidth lasers. These achievements mainly relying on Si, SiO$_{2}$, and Si$_{3}$N$_{4}$ are expected to be further improved by introducing new materials having higher nonlinearity. However, establishing fabrication processes to shape a new material into the resonator geometries having extremely smooth surfaces on a chip has been a challenging task. Here we describe a universal method to implement high-Q resonators with any materials which can be deposited in high vacuum. This approach, by which light-guiding cores having surface roughness in molecular-scale is automatically defined along the prepatterned platform structures during the deposition, is verified with As$_{2}$S$_{3}$, a typical chalcogenide glass of high-nonlinearity. The Q-factor of the developed resonator is 14.4 million approaching the loss of chalcogenide fibers, which is measured in newly proposed tunable waveguide-to-resonator coupling scheme with high ideality. Lasing by stimulated Brillouin process is demonstrated with threshold power of 0.53 mW which is 100 times lower than the previous record based on chalcogenide glasses. This approach paves the way for bringing various materials of distinguished virtues to the on-chip domain while keeping the loss performance comparable to that of bulk form.