Dense and Sharp Resonance Peaks in Stretched Moir\'e Waveguides

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that stretched moiré patterns in silicon waveguides produce dense, sharp resonance peaks in transmission spectra, with peak density and quality factors scaling predictably with the supercell period ratio R.

Contribution

It introduces a method to generate dense resonance peaks in waveguides using stretched moiré patterns and characterizes their dependence on the supercell period ratio R.

Findings

Resonance peak density increases linearly with R.

Sharp peaks are achieved in strongly scattering regimes.

Quality factors of peaks grow exponentially with R.

Abstract

In this article, we demonstrate dense resonant peaks in the transmission spectra of a rectangular waveguide inscribed with a stretched moir\'e pattern. We investigated an array of silicon waveguides with sinusoidally modulated cladding of varying depth of modulation. The investigation reveals a critical depth of modulation that splits the geometries into weakly scattering and strongly scattering regimes. Geometries in the weakly scattering regime resemble Bragg waveguides with shallow cladding modulation, whereas in the strongly scattering regime, the geometries resemble chains of isolated dielectric particles. The guided mode photonic bandgap for geometries in the strongly scattering regime is much larger than that of the weakly scattering regime. By inscribing stretched moir\'e patterns in the strongly scattering regime, we show that a large number of sharp peaks can be created in the transmission spectra of the waveguide. All periodic stretched moir\'e patterns can be identified with an R parameter. The R parameter indicates the ratio of the supercell period of the stretched system to the unstretched system. Our empirical study shows that the density of peaks linearly increases with R. The multiple resonance peaks evolve along well-defined trajectories with quality factor defined by exponential functions of R.