This paper proposes some possible applications for silicon-polymer hybrid systems, including mid-infrared parametric amplifiers with exceptional performance. This is made possible by the combination of the high optical nonlinearity exhibited by modern synthetic polymers and the sharp mode confinement of nano-scale silicon waveguides.

Using slot waveguides and nonlinear electrooptic polymers, we demonstrate a modulator with a halfwave drive voltage of 0.25 V, one of the lowest values obtained anywhere. This result highlights the benefits that can be obtained with the close integration of nonlinear polymers and silicon waveguides.

We demonstrate that the surface states of silicon waveguides can absorb photons near 1.55 microns in a single photon process, even though the bandgap of silicon exceeds the photon energy. A photocurrent results through an as yet undetermined mechanism, allowing the creation of a photodetector with quantum effeciency 2.8%.

Using the extremely large nonlinearity found in modern nonlinear polymers, we project that it will soon be possible to generate moderate amounts of terahertz and mid-infrared radiation directly through difference frequency mixing of two CW near-infrared optical signals. Until now, this method of generating terahertz radiation required pulsed lasers due to lower nonlinearities.

A reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexer (ROADM) is built, based on a silicon ridge waveguide, with planar electrodes and electrooptic polymers.

We demonstrate that in a single lithographic step, slotted and segmented waveguides can be defined which have both a slot geometry, and nearly transparent optical electrical contacts. This is a vital piece of photonics infrastructure needed to fully explot electroopic modulation with slot waveguides. Exceptionally low losses of 4 dB/cm are shown.

We discuss the theoretical performance of a number of different slot waveguide based electrooptic modulators. When used with the exceptionally active polymers that have recently been demonstrated, we predict that extremely low drive voltage modulators should become possible.

We demonstrate that a Terahertz bandwidth all-optical modulator can be built with silicon ridge waveguides and a nonlinear polymer cladding. This all-optical modulator demonstrates performance beyond what can be done with silicon alone; it is a good example of the benefits that can be achieved by using a silicon and nonlinear polymer hybrid system.

We demonstrate a waveguide design that involves a periodic series of arms connected to a silicon ridge waveguide. The arms are optically transparent, allowing both electrical contact and optical waveguiding to be achieved in a single lithographic step. The propagation loss of the segmented waveguide is -16 dB/cm.

We demonstrate modulation using electrooptic polymers in slotted silicon waveguides. We achieve exceptionally 5.2 GHz/V of tunability for resonators based on these waveguides. Further, we show that even with no bias voltage, direct conversion from the optical signal to electrical power can be obtained through optical rectification.

We develop a semi-analytic formalism that can be used to predict the tunability of resonators based on the waveguide geometry and the modal pattern. We then perform experiments that confirm the accuracy of our models through temperature variation and also changing the indices of the cladding materials of the resonators.

We design and fabricate slotted waveguides in silicon-on-insulator. Ring resonators based on these waveguides are also built and characterized, and Q values of 27,000 are obtained, corresponding to a waveguide loss of -10 dB/cm.

We design and fabricate surface-plasmon based waveguides that are readily integrated with ridge silicon waveguides. Our waveguides have 1.2 dB/micron loss and can guide light around 0.5 micron bends. We also show that light can be effeciently coupled between these waveguides and more conventional silicon ridge waveguides.