Nano actuator and “pull-back” nonlinearity

Abstract

This paper presents an optical force driven nano-machined actuator and the "pull-back" effect of a free-standing arc in an opto-mechanical ring resonator system. This nano-actuator obtains a maximal central displacement of 43.1 nm, with an actuation resolution of 0.28 nm, via tuning the wavelength of the control light at a fixed optical power of 2.8 mW. The "pull-back" effect occurs at the maximal displacement position, which is studied by the combination of experiments and simulation. Potential applications include bio-nano-motor, all-optical switches and opto-mechanical memories.

Integrated tunable laser controlled by nano-silicon-photonic circuits

“…Compared with III-V platform tunable lasers [23,67], it has lower cost and better compatibility with CMOS processes, benefited from the silicon platform. In contrast to the non-negligible transmission loss in the free-space structures due to the beam divergence [6,7], this tunable laser has a much lower optical transmission loss (< 2 dB/cm). As a result, it has the capability to construct a longer external cavity as compared with MEMS tunable lasers, lengthening from several tens of µm to several mm, which is helpful for obtaining narrow linewidth.…”

“…Although the chip-scale micro-electrical-mechanical-systems (MEMS) tunable laser realizes more compact and stable integration [5], the light path is still in free-space. Thus it suffers high optical loss caused by beam divergence in the air-medium external cavity [6,7]. This disadvantage limits the performance of the tunable laser and causes conflicts between the key parameters.…”

“…Various types of MEMS external cavity configurations have been reported [6,7,[44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52] non-standard grating scheme [6].…”

“…Supposed the 3-dB gain spectrum covers all possible channels, the maximum wavelength tuning range Δλmax is dependent on the FSR of the CRS, which is the space between two reflection peaks, and can be expressed as. 6) where M = R1/ΔR is the magnification factor resulted from the Vernier effect, ΔR = R1-R2 is the radii difference. FSR1 = λ 2 /2πR1ng is the FSR of Ring 1, ng is the group index of silicon waveguide.…”