Silicon Double-Disk Optomechanical Resonators from Wafer-Scale Double-Layered Silicon-on-Insulator

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a wafer-scale fabrication process for silicon double-disk optomechanical resonators with high optical quality factors and strong optomechanical coupling, advancing scalable integrated photonics.

Contribution

The authors develop a novel wafer-scale fabrication method for silicon double-disk resonators with integrated optical coupling, enabling scalable production of high-performance optomechanical devices.

Findings

Optical quality factors around 10^5 achieved.

Single-photon optomechanical coupling of ~15 kHz demonstrated.

First large-scale fabrication of silicon double-disk resonators.

Abstract

Whispering gallery mode (WGM) optomechanical resonators are a promising technology for the simultaneous control and measurement of optical and mechanical degrees of freedom at the nanoscale. They offer potential for use across a wide range of applications such as sensors and quantum transducers. Double-disk WGM resonators, which host strongly interacting mechanical and optical modes co-localized around their circumference, are particularly attractive due to their high optomechanical coupling. Large-scale integrated fabrication of silicon double-disk WGM resonators has not previously been demonstrated. In this work we present a process for the fabrication of double-layer silicon-on-insulator wafers, which we then use to fabricate functional optomechanical double silicon disk resonators with on-chip optical coupling. The integrated devices present an experimentally observed optical quality factors of the order of 10^5 and a single-photon optomechanical coupling of approximately 15 kHz.