Explaining interactions between light, heat, and charge carriers in silicon photonic microresonators
Friday, March 28, 2014 - 08:30
in Physics & Chemistry
In an article appearing in the March 28th issue of Physical Review Letters, researchers from Northwestern University working with researchers from the NIST Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology (CNST) have presented a new analysis that accurately describes the behavior of silicon photon microresonators in the nonlinear regime, where the amount of light exiting the system is not directly proportional to the amount of light entering it. Their work includes simple equations to provide physical intuition and scaling rules that can be used to design new chip-scale photonic devices, including optically-driven oscillators and switches with potential applications as optical components in computing and communication systems.