Thermally tunable silicon photonic microdisk resonator with transparent graphene nanoheaters

Abstract

Efficient tunable photonic integrated devices are important for the realization of reconfigurable photonic systems. Thermal tuning is a convenient and effective approach, and silicon’s large heat conductivity, thermo-optical coefficient, and CMOS fabrication compatibility make it a good candidate material for tunable optical microcavities, which are versatile elements in low-cost, large-scale photonic integrated circuits. Metal heaters are traditionally used for tuning, and a thick SiO2 upper-cladding layer is usually needed to prevent light absorption by the metal since that could reduce response speed and heating efficiency. In this paper, we propose and experimentally demonstrate thermally tunable silicon photonic microdisk resonators by introducing transparent graphene nanoheaters, which contact the silicon core directly without any isolator layer. The theoretical and experimental results show that the transparent graphene nanoheaters improve the heating efficiency, the temporal response, and the achievable temperature in comparison with a traditional metal heater. Furthermore, the graphene nanoheater is convenient for use in ultrasmall nanophotonic integrated devices due to its single-atom thickness and excellent flexibility. Both experiments and simulations show that the transparent graphene nanoheater is a promising option for other thermally tunable photonic integrated devices such as optical filters and switches.