Effectofdielectriccladdingsontheelectro-opticbehavior.pdfVIP

Letter Vol. 41, No. 6 / March 15 2016 / Optics Letters 1185 Effect of dielectric claddings on the electro-optic behavior of silicon waveguides 1,† 1, ,† 1 2 RAJAT SHARMA, MATTHEW W. PUCKETT, * HUNG-HSI LIN, ANDREI ISICHENKO, FELIPE VALLINI ,1 AND YESHAIAHU FAINMAN1 1Department of Electrical Computer Engineering, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, California 92023, USA 2School of Applied and Engineering Physics, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853, USA *Corresponding author: mwpucket@ Received 30 November 2015; revised 27 December 2015; accepted 27 December 2015; posted 6 January 2016 (Doc. ID 254799); published 10 March 2016 We fabricate silicon waveguides in silicon-on-insulator (SOI) 330 pm/V have been reported for theχ 2 coefficient in strained wafers clad with either silicon dioxide, silicon nitride, or alu- silicon waveguides [6]. minum oxide and, by measuring their electro-optic behavior, Recently, however, it has been found that strained silicon’s we characterize the capacitively induced free-carrier effect. By electro-optic effect is roughly quadratic in nature, rather than comparing our results with simulations, we confirm that the linear, as would be expected for the Pockels effect [7]. Further- observed voltage dependences of the transmission spectra are more, many demonstrations of strained silicon’s nonlinear proper- due to changes in the concentrations of holes and electrons ties have incorrectly assumed that the electric field used to control within the semiconductor waveguides and show how