Designed non-Hermitian states in notched silicon microring resonator
Date
2021
Authors
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Journal ISSN
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Hermitian states in the physical system require the system to satisfy the Hermitian operation for which the system needs to be completely isolated from its surrounding environment so that the system can exhibit the real-valued eigenvalues and orthogonal eigenvectors. However, nonconservative system are ubiquitous in the real world since the system is not completely isolated from its environment and these systems are classified as non-Hermitian system. Non-Hermitian system in nanophotonic has been fascinating because of the similarities between Maxwell’s equation and the Schrodinger equations and the system behavior can be tuned properly the response by controlling the dissipation (loss) and amplification (gain) properly, resulting in the special singularities so-called exceptional point (EP). Especially, the microcavities (microring resonator) are preferred to achieve those specular properties of EPs because of its high mode confinement in compact size and easy implementation through nanofabrication procedures. However, to this time, those demonstrated works based on microring resonator demand the usage of external gain or loss material or coupled microring resonators or externally tunable mechanical set-up. And the ubiquitous fabrication induced random sidewall roughness deviates the system away from the desired performance. Therefore, in order to resolve above-mentioned demanding requirements for the realization of the chiral sates in microring resonator, in this thesis, I briefly overviewed the non-Hermitian Hamiltonian in optics. Without an expense of the excess gain and loss materials or without requiring a mechanical set-up to manipulate the non-Hermitian system, I introduced a novel methodology to manipulate the non-Hermitian system with the nano-scatter geometries, which can be defined by the electro-beam lithography and achieved well-shaped geometries with the traditional fabrication methodologies. the influence of the random sidewall roughness on the phase shifter-based microring resonator is theoretically studied and experimentally measured based on the novel interferometric approach and discussed numerically with the extracted experimental parameters. In the following, a scatter geometric controlled non-Hermitian system based microring resonator is experimentally demonstrated and interpreted through the previously developed coupled mode theory. Finally, we discuss the tunable non-Hermitian system either electro-optically by an integrated micro-heater or all-optically by the strong two photon absorption induced nonlinear dispersion in silicon material. In order to do that, I discuss the tuning mechanism based on the coupled mode theory and developed the simplified model to interpret the experimental measurements. Those systems are implemented in microring resonators with asymmetric scatter, with inter-scatter phase controlled by local heater and non-uniform optical field distribution for all-optical switching. The engineered device topology can significantly improve the power efficiency for silicon photonic switch and modulators in optical interconnects.
Description
Keywords
Non-Hermitian states, Notched silicon microring resonator