Dry-etched ultrahigh-Q silica microdisk resonators on a silicon chip

Abstract

We demonstrate the fabrication of ultrahigh quality (Q) factor silica microdisk resonators on a silicon chip by inductively coupled plasma (ICP) etching. We achieve a dry-etched optical microresonator with an intrinsic Q factor as high as 1.94 × 10 8 from a 1-mm-diameter silica microdisk with a thickness of 4 μm. Our work provides a chip-based microresonator platform operating in the ultrahigh-Q region that will be useful in nonlinear photonics such as Brillouin lasers and Kerr microcombs.