Scalable Fabrication of Integrated Nanophotonic Circuits on Arrays of Thin Single Crystal Diamond Membrane Windows

• DOI: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.6b00974
• Publication Date: 2016-04-25T13:53:48Z
• Authors: Afaq H. Piracha; Patrik Rath; Kumaravelu Ganesan; Stefan Kühn; Wolfram H. P. Per...; Steven Prawer
• Keywords: Technology; ddc:600; info:eu-repo/classification/ddc/600; 600; 02 engineering and technology; 0210 nano-technology; 530; 620

Diamond has emerged as a promising platform for nanophotonic, optical, and quantum technologies. High-quality, single crystalline substrates of acceptable size are a prerequisite to meet the demanding requirements on low-level impurities and low absorption loss when targeting large photonic circuits. Here, we describe a scalable fabrication method for single crystal diamond membrane windows that achieves three major goals with one fabrication method: providing high quality diamond, as confirmed by Raman spectroscopy; achieving homogeneously thin membranes, enabled by ion implantation; and providing compatibility with established planar fabrication via lithography and vertical etching. On such suspended diamond membranes we demonstrate a suite of photonic components as building blocks for nanophotonic circuits. Monolithic grating couplers are used to efficiently couple light between photonic circuits and optical fibers. In waveguide coupled optical ring resonators, we find loaded quality factors up to 66 000 at a wavelength of 1560 nm, corresponding to propagation loss below 7.2 dB/cm. Our approach holds promise for the scalable implementation of future diamond quantum photonic technologies and all-diamond photonic metrology tools.