Ultra-high four wave mixing efficiency in slot waveguides with silicon nanocrystals

Abstract

We report on wavelength conversion through four-wave-mixing in silicon slot-waveguides with embedded silicon nanocrystals. The combination of strong optical confinement and Si:nc nonlinearity provides a huge waveguide nonlinear coefficient γ = 1100 W-1m-1. Moreover, the improvement in the fabrication procedure allowed a loss reduction with respect to previous reported structures, enabling the achievement of an extreme value for the conversion efficiency which represents the best result ever reported in the scientific literature. © 2011 American Institute of Physics.