Title: Silicon Photonic Devices and Their Applications
Description: Silicon photonics is the study and application of photonic systems, which use silicon as an optical medium. Data is transferred in the systems by optical rays. This technology is seen as the substitutions of electric computer chips in the future and the means to keep tack on the Moore’s law. Cavity optomechanics is a rising field of silicon photonics. It focuses on the interaction between light and mechanical objects. Although it is currently at its early stage of growth, this field has attracted rising attention. Here, we present highly sensitive optical detection of acceleration using an optomechanical accelerometer. The core part of this accelerometer is a slot-type photonic crystal cavity with strong optomechanical interactions. We first discuss theoretically the optomechanical coupling in the air-slot mode-gap photonic crystal cavity. The dispersive coupling gom is numerically calculated. Dynamical parametric oscillations for both cooling and amplification, in the resolved and unresolved sideband limit, are examined numerically, along with the displacement spectral density and cooling rates for the various operating parameters.

Experimental results also demonstrated that the cavity has a large optomechanical coupling rate. The optically induced spring effect, damping and amplification of the mechanical modes are observed with measurements both in air and in vacuum. Then, we propose and demonstrate our optomechanical accelerometer. It can operate with a resolution of 730 ng/Hz¹/² (or equivalently 40.1 aN/Hz¹/²) and with a transduction bandwidth of ≈ 85 kHz. We also demonstrate an integrated photonics device, an on-chip spectroscopy, in the last part of this thesis. This new type of on-chip microspectrometer is based on the Vernier effect of two cascaded micro-ring cavities. It can measure optical spectrum with a bandwidth of 74nm and a resolution of 0.22 nm in a small footprint of 1.5 mm².