Nanomechanically suspended low-loss silicon nanowire waveguide as in-plane displacement sensor

Abstract

We have devised an air-suspended nano-optomechanical structure that is capable of precisely detecting in-plane motion up to a precision of subnanometer level. To achieve the detection, we utilized a basic silicon photonic building block (i.e., a nanowire waveguide directional coupler) in conjunction with nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS). We numerically optimized the design and experimentally demonstrated a displacement sensitivity of 8.83×10−5 V/nm−1 with a low noise-level resolution of 0.172 nm/√Hz in a 1 Hz bandwidth centered at 950 Hz. As the waveguide coupler design does not segmentize nanowire waveguides, we eliminated the undesirable insertion losses and coupling losses irrelevant to the measurand. Furthermore the design is simple, ultracompact, and can be easily integrated with on-chip photonic systems, which may be beneficial for applications that require a compact displacement sensor with high accuracy and precision.