Inverse-Designed Silicon Nitride Nanophotonics

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the use of inverse design techniques to create silicon nitride nanophotonic devices with advanced functionalities, validated through experiments, enabling new applications in nonlinear and quantum optics.

Contribution

It introduces inverse-designed silicon nitride photonic structures, expanding design possibilities beyond traditional methods and enabling high-Q resonators with tunable properties.

Findings

Successful experimental validation of inverse-designed photonic devices

Creation of high-Q resonators with controllable wavelength and dispersion

Potential for on-chip nonlinear and quantum optics applications

Abstract

Silicon nitride photonics has enabled integration of a variety of components for applications in linear and nonlinear optics, including telecommunications, optical clocks, astrocombs, bio-sensing, and LiDAR. With the advent of inverse design - where desired device performance is specified and closely achieved through iterative, gradient-based optimization - and the increasing availability of silicon nitride photonics via foundries, it is now feasible to expand the photonic design library beyond the limits of traditional approaches and unlock new functionalities. In this work, we present inverse-designed photonics on a silicon nitride platform and demonstrate both the design capabilities and experimental validation of manipulating light in wavelength and spatial mode dimensions to high-Q resonators with controllable wavelength range and dispersion. Furthermore, we use these inverse-designed structures to form optical cavities that hold promise for on-chip nonlinear and quantum optics experiments.