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Abstract
Polarization handling in suspended silicon photonics has the potential to enable new applications in fields such as optomechanics, photonic microelectromechanical systems, and mid-infrared photonics. In this work, we experimentally demonstrate a suspended polarization beam splitter on a silicon-on-insulator waveguide platform, based on an asymmetric directional coupler. Our device presents polarization extinction ratios above 10 and 15 dB, and insertion losses below 5 and 1 dB, for TM and TE polarized input, respectively, across a 40 nm wavelength range at 1550 nm, with a device length below 8 µm. These results make our suspended polarization beam splitter a promising building block for future systems based on polarization diversity suspended photonics.
Highlights
Exploiting the polarization degree of freedom in silicon photonics has the potential to increase the bandwidth of optical communication systems [1], enable new sensors [2], and provide novel devices for polarization encoding in quantum information processing systems [3]
A key device required for such technology is the polarization beam splitter (PBS), which splits two orthogonal polarizations from one input waveguide into two different output waveguides [1, 4,5,6,7,8]
Suspended waveguides enable coupling between mechanical motion and optical fields, which leads to devices based on optically-induced motion, so-called optomechanics [9], and motion-induced optical tuning, generally called photonic microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) [10]
Summary
Exploiting the polarization degree of freedom in silicon photonics has the potential to increase the bandwidth of optical communication systems [1], enable new sensors [2], and provide novel devices for polarization encoding in quantum information processing systems [3]. The suspended solid core can be made very thin, and a large fraction of the optical power can propagate outside of the core and be used for sensing of gases or liquids, since suspended waveguides have a perfectly symmetric index difference between the core and the top and bottom claddings [11, 12]. This is interesting for mid-infrared (mid-IR) wavelengths, since the rotational and vibrational absorption lines of many relevant materials lie in the mid-IR [13]
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