Thermo-optically tunable slot waveguide-based dual mode-splitting resonators with enhanced sharp lineshapes

Abstract

Slot waveguide plays an essential role in achieving high-performance on-chip photonic sensors and nonlinear devices. Ideally, slot waveguide features a large evanescent field ratio and strong electric field intensity in the slot, leading to a high waveguide sensitivity. Unfortunately, the microring resonator (MRR) based on the slot waveguide suffers the less steep spectral slope due to the low quality factor induced by the huge optical propagation loss of the slot waveguide. In this work, a novel dual mode-splitting resonator based on the slot waveguide is proposed and demonstrated to steepen the slope of lineshapes. The device is implemented by two racetrack resonators based on a slot waveguide and a feedback waveguide to introduce coherent optical mode interference, which could induce mode-splitting resonance (MR) with sharp asymmetry line shape and large extinction ratio (ER). The proposed device is fabricated by the standard complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technologies on silicon-on-insulator (SOI) platform, and the characterization results show dual MRs with an ER of 45.0 dB and a slope rate (SR) of 58.3 dB/nm, exhibiting a much steeper lineshape than that of the conventional MRR with slot waveguide. And the resonance can be tuned efficiently by applying various voltages of the TiN microheater. Investigations in dual MRs devices promote many potential applications in the field of optical switching, optical modulating, and on-chip optical sensing.