Planar Chalcogenide Glass Mid-Infrared Photonics

Chalcogenide glasses, namely the amorphous compounds containing sulfur, selenium, and/or tellurium, have emerged as a promising material candidate for mid-infrared integrated photonics given their wide optical transparency window, high linear and nonlinear indices, as well as their capacity for monolithic integration on a wide array of substrates. Exploiting these unique features of the material, we demonstrated high-index-contrast, waveguide-coupled As 2Se3 chalcogenide glass resonators monolithically integrated on silicon with a high intrinsic quality factor of 2 × 10 5 at 5.2 micron wavelength, and what we believe to be the first waveguide photonic crystal cavity operating in the mid-infrared. © 2014 SPIE