Ultra-high-Q racetrack microring based on silicon-nitride

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel silicon-nitride racetrack resonator with an ultra-high Q factor of 4.57×10^7, achieved through innovative waveguide design and fabrication, enabling compact, low-loss photonic devices for microwave photonics.

Contribution

The paper introduces a new ultra-high-Q silicon-nitride racetrack resonator with a unique waveguide design that reduces loss and chip footprint, surpassing previous Q factor records.

Findings

Achieved an intrinsic Q of 4.57×10^7 for the resonator.

Propagating loss of the waveguide is only 1.80 dB/m.

Resonator length is 2.226 mm, the shortest with such high Q.

Abstract

Ultra-high-Q resonators are fundamentally important to optics and microwave photonics. Up to now, it is still very challenging to boost the Q factor while maintaining a compact size for a resonator. Herein, we proposed and demonstrated an ultra-high-Q silicon-nitride (Si3N4) racetrack resonator with uniform multi-mode Si3N4 photonic waveguides. It consists of two multi-mode straight waveguides connected by two multi-mode waveguide bends (MWBs). In particular, the MWBs are based on modified Euler curves, and a multi-mode straight waveguide directional coupler is used for the fundamental mode coupling and avoid exciting higher-order modes in the racetrack. In this way, the fundamental mode is excited and propagates in the multi-mode racetrack resonator with ultra-low loss. Meanwhile, it helps to achieve a compact 180{\deg} bend to reduce the chip footprint. In this paper, the propagation loss of the fundamental mode is significantly reduced with standard fabrication process by broadening the waveguides width to as wide as 3{\mu}m. Results show that an ultra-high-Q resonator with an intrinsic Q of TE mode is 4.57*10^7, and the corresponding propagation loss of the waveguide is only 1.80 dB/m. To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest Q value of the ring resonator with only 2.226 mm ring length reported so far. The proposed ultra-high-Q Si3N4 resonator can be used to microwave photonic filters and optoelectronic oscillators with large operation bandwidth.