Ridge-type suspended waveguide Brillouin laser

Abstract

As is well known, the on-chip waveguide with high Brillouin gain has many applications in the field of photonics. Brillouin lasers on silicon substrates are widely used in frequency tunable laser emission, mode-locked pulsed lasers, low-noise oscillators and optical gyroscopes. However, in a silicon-based Brillouin laser, a long waveguide length is still used to achieve Brillouin laser output, which is not conducive to on-chip integration. In this work is proposed a new type of waveguide structure consisting of chalcogenide As₂S₃ rectangles and an air slit. Owing to the existence of the air gap, the radiation pressure makes the enhancement of Brillouin nonlinearity much higher than the enhancement caused only by the material nonlinearity. This makes the Brillouin gain reach 1.78 × 10⁵ W^–1·m^–1, which is nearly 10 times larger than the previously reported backward SBS gain of 2.88 × 10⁴ W^–1·m^–1, resulting in phonon frequency tuning in a 4.2–7.0 GHz range. This method provides a new idea for designing nano-scaled optical waveguides for forward stimulated Brillouin scattering, and at the same time, this enhanced broadband coherent phonon emission paves the way for improving the hybrid on-chip CMOS signal processing technology.