Free-carrier absorption modulation in silicon nanocrystal slot waveguides.
Free-carrier absorption (FCA) has proven to be an important obstacle in the development of a silicon-based laser; however, FCA may serve as a potential advantage in active silicon-based switches or modulators. In this work, we present FCA modulation in slot waveguides with silicon nanocrystals (Si-ncs) embedded in SiO(2) as the low-index slot material. Slot waveguides were fabricated with and without Si-ncs, and the presence of Si-ncs was shown to increase the pump-induced FCA loss in the waveguides by a factor of 4.5. We modeled the Si-nc material using a four-level rate equation analysis to estimate the excited population of Si-ncs, allowing us to extract a value of 2.6 × 10(-17) cm(2) for the FCA cross section of the Si-nc material.
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware 19716, USA. tcreazzo@udel.edu
Tim
T
Creazzo
Brandon
B
Redding
Elton
E
Marchena
Shouyuan
S
Shi
Dennis W
DW
Prather