Free-standing high quality factor thin-film lithium niobate micro-photonic disk resonators

Lithium Niobate (LN or just niobate) thin-film micro-photonic resonators have promising prospects in many applications including high efficiency electro-optic modulators, optomechanics and nonlinear optics. This paper presents free-standing thin-film lithium niobate photonic resonators on a silicon platform using MEMS fabrication technology. We fabricated a 35um radius niobate disk resonator that exhibits high intrinsic optical quality factor (Q) of 484,000. Exploiting the optomechanical interaction from the released free-standing structure and high optical Q, we were able to demonstrate acousto-optic modulation from these devices by exciting a 56MHz radial breathing mechanical mode (mechanical Q of 2700) using a probe.

[1]  S. Berneschi,et al.  Planar coupling to high-Q lithium niobate disk resonators. , 2011, Optics express.

[2]  F. Baida,et al.  Enhanced Electro-optical Lithium Niobate Photonic Crystal Wire Waveguide on a Smart-cut Thin Film References and Links , 2022 .

[3]  Davide Janner,et al.  Room temperature direct bonding of LiNbO3 crystal layers and its application to high-voltage optical sensing , 2011 .

[4]  T. Gaylord,et al.  Lithium niobate: Summary of physical properties and crystal structure , 1985 .

[5]  M. Lipson,et al.  CMOS compatible reconfigurable filter for high bandwidth non-blocking operation. , 2011, Optics express.

[6]  Tzyy-Jiann Wang,et al.  Electro-optically tunable microring resonators on lithium niobate. , 2007, Optics letters.

[7]  T. Kippenberg,et al.  Cavity Optomechanics: Back-Action at the Mesoscale , 2008, Science.

[8]  Thomas Udem,et al.  Monolithic carrier-envelope phase-stabilization scheme. , 2005, Optics letters.

[9]  Sasan Fathpour,et al.  Heterogeneous lithium niobate photonics on silicon substrates. , 2013, Optics express.

[10]  Linjie Zhou,et al.  Silicon electro-optic modulators using p-i-n diodes embedded 10-micron-diameter microdisk resonators. , 2006, Optics express.

[11]  Cai,et al.  Observation of critical coupling in a fiber taper to a silica-microsphere whispering-gallery mode system , 2000, Physical review letters.

[12]  J. Bowers,et al.  Widely tunable Vernier ring laser on hybrid silicon. , 2013, Optics express.

[13]  E.L. Wooten,et al.  A review of lithium niobate modulators for fiber-optic communications systems , 2000, IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics.

[14]  Cheng-An Lee,et al.  High-quality LiNbO3 microdisk resonators by undercut etching and surface tension reshaping. , 2012, Optics express.