title: Athermal silicon waveguides with bridged subwavelength gratings for TE and TM polarizations.
abstract: In this paper, athermal silicon waveguides using bridged subwavelength grating (BSWG) structures are proposed and investigated. The realization of temperature-independent BSWG waveguides for both polarizations is demonstrated numerically and experimentally. SU-8 polymer is used as the cladding material to compensate for the positive thermo-optic (TO) coefficient (dn/dT) of silicon. We investigate the dependence of the effective TO coefficient of BSWG waveguides on both the bridge width and grating duty cycle. The BSWG waveguides have a width of 490 nm, a height of 260 nm, and a grating pitch of 250 nm. Athermal behavior is achieved for both the transverse-magnetic (TM) and the transverse-electric (TE) polarized light for a variety of bridge width and duty cycle combinations. Furthermore, the BSWGs can be designed to be athermal for both TE and TM polarization simultaneously.
authors.affiliation: Department of Electronics, Carleton University, 1125 Colonel By Drive Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. mibrahi3@doe.carleton.ca
authors.forename: Marc
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Ibrahim
authors.forename: Jens H
authors.initials: JH
authors.lastname: Schmid
authors.forename: Alireza
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Aleali
authors.forename: Pavel
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Cheben
authors.forename: Jean
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Lapointe
authors.forename: Siegfried
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Janz
authors.forename: Przemek J
authors.initials: PJ
authors.lastname: Bock
authors.forename: Adam
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Densmore
authors.forename: Boris
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Lamontagne
authors.forename: Rubin
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Ma
authors.forename: Dan-Xia
authors.initials: DX
authors.lastname: Xu
authors.forename: Winnie N
authors.initials: WN
authors.lastname: Ye