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Interaction between light and highly confined hypersound in a silicon photonic nanowire

Nature Photonics volume 9, pages 199–203 (2015)Cite this article

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An Erratum to this article was published on 28 May 2015

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Abstract

In the past decade there has been a surge in research at the boundary between photonics and phononics. Most efforts have centred on coupling light to motion in a high-quality optical cavity, typically geared towards manipulating the quantum state of a mechanical oscillator. It was recently predicted that the strength of the light–sound interaction would increase drastically in nanoscale silicon photonic wires. Here we demonstrate, for the first time, such a giant overlap between near-infrared light and gigahertz sound co-localized in a small-core silicon wire. The wire is supported by a tiny pillar to block the path for external phonon leakage, trapping 10 GHz phonons in an area of less than 0.1 μm2. Because our geometry can also be studied in microcavities, it paves the way for complete fusion between the fields of cavity optomechanics and Brillouin scattering. The results bode well for the realization of optically driven lasers/sasers, isolators and comb generators on a densely integrated silicon chip.

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Figure 1: A silicon wire on a pillar as an acoustic phonon cavity.
Figure 2: Experimental characterization of photon–phonon coupling.
Figure 3: Analysis of Brillouin gain and phononic resonance frequency.
Figure 4: Study of the mechanical quality factor and intrinsic photon–phonon overlap.

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Change history

  • 08 May 2015

    In the version of this Article originally published, in the expression for Leff on page 200 the exponential should have contained a minus sign and the expression should have read Leff = (1 – exp(−α L))/α. This has been corrected in the online versions.

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Acknowledgements

R.V.L. thanks the Agency for Innovation by Science and Technology in Flanders (IWT) for a PhD grant. This work was partially funded under the FP7-ERC-InSpectra programme and the ITN-network cQOM. R.V.L. thanks T. Van Vaerenbergh and S. Clemmen for reading the manuscript and L. Van Landschoot for taking SEM images.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Photonics Research Group, Ghent University–imec, Sint-Pietersnieuwstraat 41, Gent 9000, Belgium

    Raphaël Van Laer, Bart Kuyken, Dries Van Thourhout & Roel Baets

  2. Center for Nano- and Biophotonics, Ghent University, Sint-Pietersnieuwstraat 41, Gent 9000, Belgium

    Raphaël Van Laer, Bart Kuyken, Dries Van Thourhout & Roel Baets

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  1. Raphaël Van Laer
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Contributions

R.V.L. performed the fabrication, experiments, analysis and wrote the paper. B.K. provided experimental and conceptual advice. D.V.T. and R.B. supervised the work. All authors discussed the results and provided feedback on the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Raphaël Van Laer.

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Van Laer, R., Kuyken, B., Van Thourhout, D. et al. Interaction between light and highly confined hypersound in a silicon photonic nanowire. Nature Photon 9, 199–203 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2015.11

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