Low-loss integrated nanophotonic circuits with layered semiconductor materials

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a low-loss integrated nanophotonic platform combining monolayer MoTe2 with silicon nitride microresonators, achieving high quality factors suitable for advanced photonic applications.

Contribution

It introduces a novel hybrid platform integrating monolayer MoTe2 with Si3N4 photonics, maintaining high Q-factors without wafer bonding.

Findings

Microresonator Q-factors exceed 3 million in telecom bands

Optical loss due to MoTe2 is minimal outside excitonic regions

Dispersion and resonance shifts are characterized with MoTe2 integration

Abstract

Monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides with direct bandgaps are emerging candidates for microelectronics, nano-photonics, and optoelectronics. Transferred onto photonic integrated circuits (PICs), these semiconductor materials have enabled new classes of light-emitting diodes, modulators and photodetectors, that could be amenable to wafer-scale manufacturing. For integrated photonic devices, the optical losses of the PICs are critical. In contrast to silicon, silicon nitride (Si3N4) has emerged as a low-loss integrated platform with a wide transparency window from ultraviolet to mid-infrared and absence of two-photon absorption at telecommunication bands. Moreover, it is suitable for nonlinear integrated photonics due to its high Kerr nonlinearity and high-power handing capability. These features of Si3N4 are intrinsically beneficial for nanophotonics and optoelectronics applications. Here we report a low-loss integrated platform incorporating monolayer molybdenum ditelluride (1L-MoTe2) with Si3N4 photonic microresonators. We show that, with the 1L-MoTe2, microresonator quality factors exceeding 3 million in the telecommunication O-band to E-band are maintained. We further investigate the change of microresonator dispersion and resonance shift due to the presence of 1L-MoTe2, and extrapolate the optical loss introduced by 1L-MoTe2 in the telecommunication bands, out of the excitonic transition region. Our work presents a key step for low-loss, hybrid PICs with layered semiconductors without using heterogeneous wafer bonding.