Explaining Interactions between Light, Heat, and Charge Carriers in Silicon Photonic Microresonators

Science Focus

original post »

In an article appearing in the March 28th issue of Physical Review Letters, researchers from Northwestern University working with researchers from the NIST Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology (CNST) have presented a new analysis that accurately describes the behavior of silicon photon microresonators in the nonlinear regime, where the amount of light exiting the system is not directly proportional to the amount of light entering it.* Their work includes simple equations to provide physical intuition and scaling rules that can be used to design new chip-scale photonic devices, including optically-driven oscillators and switches with potential applications as optical components in computing and communication systems. The researchers studied a 10 µm diameter, 260 nm thick silicon microdisk resonator fabricated in the CNST NanoFab and optically probed with a continuous infrared laser. When the laser light entering the device is at low intensity, the fraction of that light exiting the device remains constant over time. However, as predicted by the researchers’ theory, when the incoming laser intensity is increased past a certain threshold, the exiting light begins to oscillate. Its intensity varies periodically in time. Its frequencies spread across several hundred megahertz and consist of narrow spectral lines which are called a “frequency comb spectrum” because of their

The post Explaining Interactions between Light, Heat, and Charge Carriers in Silicon Photonic Microresonators has been published on Technology Org.

No related news.

 
#physics  
original post: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TechnologyOrgPhysicsNews/~3/8LTQ0nGateU/
See Zazzle gifts tagged with 'science'