Recent Advances in Silicon Nitride and Silicon-Rich Nitride as a Photonic Platform
A special issue of Crystals (ISSN 2073-4352).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 October 2024 | Viewed by 131
Special Issue Editors
Interests: photonics; integrated optics; spectroscopy; Bragg reflectors; optical sensing
Interests: fundamental optical properties of photonic materials; in particular materials with periodic, random or quasi-crystalline structure
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Silicon nitride has generated significant interest as a Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (CMOS)-compatible integrated photonics platform. In its stoichiometric form, it displays extremely low loss and an optical transparency window that ranges from the near ultraviolet to the mid-infrared. The absence of two-photon absorption (TPA) at telecommunication wavelengths, combined with a high optical damage threshold, makes it particularly attractive for high-power applications. Although the material is centrosymmetric, second-order nonlinear effects have been observed in silicon nitride waveguides due to symmetry breaking of the bulk material, as well as through more exotic phenomena such as the coherent photogalvanic effect. Furthermore, increasing the silicon concentration of the material modifies the optical properties and produces silicon-rich nitride (SRN). An increasing silicon concentration results in higher refractive index and higher optical nonlinearities, although this comes at the cost of increasing optical losses and TPA. These properties have led to promising proof-of-concept devices for applications including optical switching and modulation, broadband nonlinear wave mixing, comb generation, and coherent supercontinuum generation. However, a number of open questions remain in order to realize the ultimate potential of silicon nitride. In particular, material engineering of the proper silicon concentration of the SRN remains an important active area of research for most applications. Furthermore, the appearance of nonlinear losses in high-silicon-concentration SRN does not seem to be fully attributable to known effects such as TPA.
Dr. Andrew Grieco
Prof. Dr. Diederik Sybolt Wiersma
Guest Editors
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Keywords
- silicon nitride
- silicon-rich nitride
- nonlinear optics
- optical modulators
- frequency combs
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