Thermoelastic damping in optical waveguide resonators with the bolometric effect.

Abstract

Incorporating the bolometric effect, the thermoelastic damping in a nanowaveguide resonator driven by an optical gradient force is investigated in this paper. Based on the Euler-Bernoulli beam theory, the governing equation of the optowaveguide resonator is derived by considering the complex distribution of injected optical power, which has significant influence on the thermoelastic damping. By solving the heat diffusion equation, the theoretical model of the thermoelastic damping is presented. In this model, the effects of injected optical power, representative temperatures, waveguide material, and geometries on the thermoelastic damping are studied and discussed respectively. The results show that the peak value of thermoelastic damping increases as the injected optical power is increasing within a low range. Hardly any changes exist for the intrinsic energy dissipation of different materials at higher injected optical power. When the environmental temperature falls in the range of 293-500 K, the thermoelastic damping increases slowly, and then drops down quickly as a function of the dimensionless frequency. However, the thermoelastic damping monotonically decreases when the representative temperature drops to lower than 293 K. In addition, the thermoelastic damping is found to be scale dependent, particularly with the effect of injected optical power.