ABSTRACT Precision Tuning of Silicon Nanophotonic Devices through Post-Fabrication Processes

In recent years, silicon photonics has begun to transition from research to commercial-ization. Decades of relentless advances in the field of computing have led to fundamental bottlenecks in the design of computers, especially in interconnect bandwidth density. For IBM, silicon photonics has become a potential technological solution for enabling the future of server systems and cutting-edge supercomputers. For Intel, silicon photonics has become a cost-effective solution for supplying the necessary bandwidth needed by future generations of consumer computing products. While the field of silicon photonics is now advancing at a rapid pace there is still a great deal of research to be done. This thesis investigates ways of improving the performance of fundamental silicon nanopho-tonic devices through post-fabrication processes. These devices include numerous optical resonator designs as well as slow-light waveguides. Optical resonators are used to confine photons both spatially and temporally. In recent years, there has been much research, both theoretical and experimental, into improving the design of optical resonators. Improving these devices through fabrication processes has generally been less studied. Optical waveg-uides are used to guide the flow of photons over chip-level distances. Slow-light waveguide