Enhanced stimulated Brillouin scattering in the unsuspended silicon waveguide assisted with genetic algorithms

Abstract

Stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS), originating from the coupling between optical and acoustic waves, has been widely applied in many fields. Silicon is the most used and important material in micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) and integrated photonic circuits. However, strong acoustic-optic interaction in silicon requires mechanical release of the silicon core waveguide to avoid acoustic energy leakage into the substrate. This will not only reduce the mechanical stability and thermal conduction, but also increase the difficulties for fabrication and large-area device integration. In this paper, we propose a silicon-aluminium nitride(AlN)-sapphire platform for realizing large SBS gain without suspending the waveguide. AlN is used as a buffer layer to reduce the phonon leakage. This platform can be fabricated via the wafer bonding between silicon and commercial AlN-sapphire wafer. We adopt a full-vectorial model to simulate the SBS gain. Both the material loss and the anchor loss of the silicon are considered. We also apply the genetic algorithm to optimize the waveguide structure. By limiting the maximum etching step number to two, we obtain a simple structure to achieve the SBS gain of 2462 W ⁻¹m ⁻¹ for forward SBS, which is 8 times larger than the recently reported result in unsuspended silicon waveguide. Our platform can enable Brillouin-related phenomena in centimetre-scale waveguides. Our findings could pave the way toward large-area unreleased opto-mechanics on silicon.

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