Design of high-Q silicon-polymer hybrid photonic crystal nanobeam microcavities for low-power and ultrafast all-optical switching

• DOI: 10.1016/j.photonics.2013.08.003
• Publication Date: 2013-09-01T14:15:18Z
• Authors: Zi-Ming Meng; Yi-Hua Hu; Chen Wang; Xiao-Lan Zhong; Wei Ding; Zhi-Yuan Li
• Keywords: 0103 physical sciences; 01 natural sciences

Owing to the unique optical properties high-Q photonic crystal nanobeam microcavities have been demonstrated in a variety of materials. In this paper the design of high-Q silicon-polymer hybrid photonic crystal nanobeam microcavities is investigated using the three:dimensional plane-wave expansion method and finite-difference time-domain method. We first discuss the design of high-Q nanobeam microcavities in silicon-on-insulator, after which the polymer is introduced into the air void to form the hybrid structures. Quality factor as high as 1 x 10(4) has been obtained for our silicon-polymer hybrid nanobeam microcavities without exhaustive parameter examination. In addition the field distribution of resonant mode can be tuned to largely overlap with polymer materials. Because of the overwhelmingly large Kerr nonlinearity of polymer over silicon, the application in all-optical switching is presented by studying the shift of the resonant frequency on the change of refractive index of polymer. The minimum switching intensity of only 0.37 GW/cm(2) is extracted for our high-Q hybrid microcavities and the corresponding single pulse energy is also discussed according to the pumping methods. The total switching time is expected to be restricted by the photon lifetime in cavity due to the ultrafast response speed of polymer. Our silicon-polymer hybrid nanobeam microcavities show great promise in constructing small-sized all-optical devices or circuits with advantages of possessing low-power and ultrafast speed simultaneously. (c) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.