We study the effect of rotation on the propagation of electromagnetic waves in slow-light waveguide structures consisting of coupled micro-ring resonators. We show that such configurations exhibit new a type of the Sagnac effect which can be used for the realization of highly-compact integrated rotation sensors and gyroscopes.
The highly efficient coupling of light from conventional optical components to optical mode volumes lies in the heart of chip-based micro-devices, which is determined by the phase-matching between propagation constants of fiber taper and the whispering-gallery-mode (WGM) of the resonator. Optical gyroscopes, typically realized as fiber-optic gyroscopes and ring-laser gyroscopes, have been the mainstay in diverse applications such as positioning and inertial sensing. Here, the phase-matching is theoretically analyzed and experimentally verified. We observe Sagnac effect in a millimeter-scale we…
We theoretically investigate integrated photonic resonators formed by two mutually coupled Sagnac loop reflectors (MC-SLRs). Mode interference in the MC-SLR resonators is tailored to achieve versatile filter shapes with high performance, which enable flexible spectral engineering for diverse applications. By adjusting the reflectivity of the Sagnac loop reflectors (SLRs) as well as the coupling strength between different SLRs, we achieve optical analogues of Fano resonance with ultrahigh spectral slope rates, wavelength interleaving / non-blocking switching functions with significantly enhance…
We demonstrate advanced integrated photonic filters in silicon-on-insulator (SOI) nanowires implemented by cascaded Sagnac loop reflector (CSLR) resonators. We investigate mode splitting in these standing-wave (SW) resonators and demonstrate its use for engineering the spectral profile of on-chip photonic filters. By changing the reflectivity of the Sagnac loop reflectors (SLRs) and the phase shifts along the connecting waveguides, we tailor mode splitting in the CSLR resonators to achieve a wide range of filter shapes for diverse applications including enhanced light trapping, flat-top filter…
We theoretically investigate advanced multi-functional integrated photonic filters formed by three waveguide coupled Sagnac loop reflectors (3WC-SLRs). By tailoring the coherent mode interference, the spectral response of the 3WC-SLR resonators is engineered to achieve diverse filtering functions with high performance. These include optical analogues of Fano resonances that yield ultrahigh spectral extinction ratios (ERs) and slope rates, resonance mode splitting with high ERs and low free spectral ranges, and classical Butterworth, Bessel, Chebyshev, and elliptic filters. A detailed analysis …
We propose and theoretically investigate integrated photonic filters based on coupled Sagnac loop reflectors (SLRs) formed by a self-coupled wire waveguide. By tailoring coherent mode interference in the device, three different filter functions are achieved, including Fano-like resonances, wavelength interleaving, and varied resonance mode splitting. For each function, the impact of device structural parameters is analyzed to facilitate optimized performance. Our results theoretically verify the proposed device as a compact multi-functional integrated photonic filter for flexible spectral shap…
We propose and demonstrate a dispersion control technique by combination of different waveguide cross sections in an aluminum nitride micro-ring resonator. Narrow and wide waveguides with normal and anomalous dispersion, respectively, are linked with tapering waveguides and enclosed in a ring resonator to produce a total dispersion near zero. The mode-coupling in multimoded waveguides is also effectively suppressed. This technique provides new degrees of freedom and enhanced flexibility in engineering the dispersion of microcomb resonators.
We study the differential group delay that can be obtained in coupled micro-ring resonator waveguides with longitudinal offset couplers. Various devices based on this effect are proposed and analyzed using a finite-differences time-domain method and their potential applications are discussed.
Tapered silica fibers are often used to rapidly probe the optical properties of micro-resonators. However, their low refractive index precludes phase-matching when coupling to high-index micro-resonators, reducing efficiency. Here we demonstrate efficient optical coupling from tapered fibers to high-index micro-resonators by loading the fibers with an ancillary adiabatic waveguide-coupler fabricated via angled-etching. We demonstrate greatly enhanced coupling to a silicon multimode micro-resonator when compared to coupling via the bare fiber only. Signatures of resonator optical bistability ar…
In this work, we focus on stub resonators embedded in plasmonic slot waveguides. The resonators have potential applications in optical interconnects and sensors. We fabricate the samples by electron beam lithography and lift-off. We use a scattering matrix based model to quantify the optical power output from the samples. We measure the properties of the resonators by coupling light in and out of the slot waveguides by optical antennas, making use of a cross-polarization based setup utilizing a supercontinuum source and a high numerical aperture objective lens operating in the telecom-waveleng…
As a fundamental optical approach to interferometry, Sagnac interference has been widely used for reflection manipulation, precision measurements, and spectral engineering in optical systems. Compared to other interferometry configurations, it offers attractive advantages by yielding a reduced system complexity without the need for phase control between different pathways, thus offering a high degree of stability against external disturbance and a low wavelength dependence. The advance of integration fabrication techniques has enabled chip-scale Sagnac interferometers with greatly reduced foot…
We study the optical transmission of a waveguide that is side-coupled to a high-$Q$ circular microresonator. The coupling is critical if the intrinsic resonator losses equate the coupling losses to the waveguide. When this happens, the transmittance of the waveguide displays resonance dips with maximal depth as the frequency is swept through the resonators resonances. We show that multiple configurations, parameterised by the minimal distance between the resonator and the waveguide, can lead to critical coupling. Indeed, for a sufficiently large resonator radius, the flow of power between the …
We study the transmission of light through a system consisting of an arbitrary number $N$ of microtoroidal resonators coupled to a one-dimensional (1D) waveguide. The transmission $T$ through such a system and its full-width at half-maximum (FWHM) are calculated for various values of $N$ and mutual-mode coupling coefficients. We found that at small mutual-mode coupling, the minimum transmission vanishes exponentially with $N$ while the FWHM is proportional to $\sqrt{N}$. At big mutual-mode coupling, as the number of resonators increases, the mode-splitting is reduced. Our findings contribute t…
Much progress, both experimentally and theoretically, has recently been made towards optical frequency comb generation from continuously pumped second-order nonlinear systems. Here, we present the first observations towards finding an integrated solution for such a system, using a titanium indiffused lithium niobate waveguide resonator. These results are compared to recently developed theory for equivalent systems. The system is seen to exhibit strong instabilities, which require further investigation in order to fully determine the suitability of this platform for stable optical frequency com…
Coupled-resonator optical waveguides (CROWs), which play a significant role in modern photonics, achieve waveguiding through near-field coupling between tightly localized resonators. The coupling factor, a critical parameter in CROW theory, determines the coupling strength between two resonators and the waveguiding dispersion of a CROW. However, the original CROW theory proposed by Yariv et al. only demonstrated one value of coupling factor for a multipole resonance mode. Here, by imaging the tight-binding Bloch waves on a CROW consisting of designer-surface-plasmon resonators in the microwave…
Whispering-gallery mode crystalline resonators currently maintain the best quality factor (Q) record, however, compact on-chip packaging is still a challenge although various coupling architectures have been developed. Here, a chemical etching method is proposed to fabricate a miniaturized tapered fiber waveguide on silicon substrate. The Marangoni effect is implemented to reduce the surface roughness of the cone region. The optical loss of 0.1 dB/mm is obtained, and the Q of on-chip crystalline resonator exceeds 108. Additionally, TEC is implanted in the package to actively customize the temp…
We propose and demonstrate subwavelength grating (SWG) metamaterial waveguides and ring resonators on a silicon nitride platform for the first time. The SWG waveguide is engineered such that a large overlap of 53% of the Bloch mode with the top cladding material is achieved, demonstrating excellent potential for applications in evanescent field sensing and light amplification. The devices, which have critical dimensions greater than 100 nm, are fabricated using a commercial rapid turn-around silicon nitride prototyping foundry process using electron beam lithography. Experimental characterizat…
Mode splitting induced by coherent optical mode interference in coupled resonant cavities is a key phenomenon in photonic resonators that can lead to powerful and versatile filtering functions, in close analogy to electromagnetically-induced-transparency, Autler-Townes splitting, Fano resonances, and dark states. It can not only break the dependence between quality factor, free spectral range, and physical cavity length, but can also lead to group delay response and mode interactions that are useful for enhancing light-material interaction and dispersion engineering in nonlinear optics. In thi…
Optical microresonators are of paramount importance in photonic circuits requiring fine spectral filtering or resonant light recirculation. Key performance metrics improve with increasing resonance quality factor (Q) across all applications. The performance of silicon photonic circuits is often hampered by the low-quality factor of planar silicon microresonators, typically of Q~10^4-10^5. On the other hand, bulk whispering gallery mode resonators provide a wide range of materials with intriguing optical properties and exceptionally high resonant quality factors Q>10^7. However, the efficient c…
Frequency combs spanning over an octave have been successfully demonstrated in Kerr nonlinear microresonators on-chip. These micro-combs rely on both engineered dispersion, to enable generation of frequency components across the octave, and on engineered coupling, to efficiently extract the generated light into an access waveguide while maintaining a close to critically-coupled pump. The latter is challenging as the spatial overlap between the access waveguide and the ring modes decays with frequency. This leads to strong coupling variation across the octave, with poor extraction at short wave…
We propose a novel scheme for enhancing the quality factor of coupled resonators optical waveguides (CROWs) when operating near a degenerate band edge (DBE). A DBE is a four-mode exceptional point of degeneracy (EPD) occurring when four Bloch eigenmodes coalesce providing a resonance condition with a giant enhancement in fields. We report an unprecedented scaling law of quality factor of CROWs when operating at the DBE, even in the presence of losses and structural perturbations. Remarkably, the Q factor of the proposed CROW can be engineered to exceed that of a single ring resonator having a …
In this work, we compare the performance of plasmonic waveguide integrated stub resonators based on 2D metal-dielectric-metal and 3D slot waveguide (SWG) geometries. We show that scattering matrix theory can be extended to 3D devices, and by employing scattering matrix theory, we provide the guidelines for designing plasmonic 2D and 3D single-stub and double-stub resonators with a desired spectral response at the design wavelength. We provide transmission maps of 2D and 3D double-stub resonators versus stub lengths, and we specify the different regions on these maps that result in a minimum, a…
Here we propose and study a novel type of plasmonic resonators based on a metal-insulator-metal waveguide and a side-coupled magneto-optical disk controlled by an external magnetic field. The wavenumber change and the transmission of surface-plasmon-polaritons (SPPs) can be tuned by altering the magnetic field and reversible on/off switching of the running SPP modes by a reversal of the direction of the external magnetic field is demonstrated. Resonant enhancement of the magneto-plasmonic modulation by more than 200 times leads to a modulation contrast ratio more than tenfold ratio (90-\%-modu…
We derive a general theory of linear coupling and Kerr nonlinear coupling between modes of dielectric optical resonators from first principles. The treatment is not specific to a particular geometry or choice of mode basis, and can therefore be used as a foundation for describing any phenomenon resulting from any combination of linear coupling, scattering and Kerr nonlinearity, such as bending and surface roughness losses, geometric backscattering, self- and cross-phase modulation, four-wave mixing, third-harmonic generation and Kerr frequency comb generation. The theory is then applied to a t…
We demonstrate full integration of vertical optical ring resonators with silicon nanophotonic waveguides on silicon-on-insulator substrates to accomplish a significant step towards 3D photonic integration. The on-chip integration is realized by rolling up 2D differentially strained TiO2 nanomembranes into 3D microtube cavities on a nanophotonic microchip. The integration configuration allows for out of plane optical coupling between the in-plane nanowaveguides and the vertical microtube cavities as a compact and mechanically stable optical unit, which could enable refined vertical light transf…
Laser cooling of mechanical degrees of freedom is one of the most significant achievements in the field of opto-mechanics. Here, we report, for the first time to the best of our knowledge, efficient passive optomechanical cooling of the motion of a freestanding waveguide coupled to a whispering-gallery-mode (WGM) resonator. The waveguide is an 8 mm long glass-fiber nanospike, which has a fundamental flexural resonance at Ω/2π = 2.5 kHz and a Q-factor of 1.2 10**5. Upon launching 250 μW laser power at an optical frequency close to the WGM resonant frequency, we observed cooling of the nanospike…
A $Q$-enhancement strategy for racetrack microresonators is put forward. The design is based on the modification of the resonator geometry in order to mitigate the two main sources of radiation loss in the presence of curved waveguides: the discontinuities at the junctions between straight waveguides and the bent sections, and the continuous loss at the curved waveguide sectors. At the same time, the modifications of the geometry do not affect the versatility of coupling of racetrack resonators in integrated optical circuits, which is their main advantage over ring microresonators. The proposa…
Microcombs -- optical frequency combs generated in coherently-driven nonlinear microresonators -- have attracted significant attention over the last decade. The ability to generate two such combs in a single resonator device has in particular enabled a host of applications from spectroscopy to imaging. Concurrently, novel comb generation techniques such as synchronous pulsed driving have been developed to enhance the efficiency and flexibility of microcomb generation. Here we report on the first experimental demonstration of dual-microcomb generation via synchronous pulsed pumping of a single …
Chipscale microresonators with integrated planar optical waveguides are useful building blocks for linear, nonlinear and quantum optical devices. Loss reduction through improving fabrication processes has resulted in several integrated micro resonator platforms attaining quality (Q) factors of several millions. However only few studies have investigated design-dependent losses, especially with regard to the resonator coupling section. Here we investigate design-dependent parasitic losses, described by the coupling ideality, of the commonly employed microresonator design consisting of a microri…
We present a novel approach and a theoretical framework for generating high order exceptional points of degeneracy (EPD) in photonic structures based on periodic coupled resonators optical waveguides (CROWs). Such EPDs involve the coalescence of Floquet-Bloch eigenwaves in CROWs, without the presence of gain and loss, which is in contrast to the requirement of Parity-Time (PT) symmetry to develop exceptional points based on gain and loss balance. The EPDs arise here by introducing symmetry breaking in a conventional chain of coupled resonators through coupling the chain of resonators to an adj…
