Material properties of tapered crystalline silicon core fibers

Crystalline silicon optical fibers are emerging as a promising platform for a wide range of optoelectronic applications. Here we report a crystallographic study of the material properties within silicon fibers that have been post-processed via a tapering procedure to obtain small, few micron-sized core diameters. Our results reveal that the tapering process can improve the polysilicon quality of the core through the formation of large, centimeter long crystal grains, thus significantly reducing the optical losses. Published by The Optical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. OCIS codes: (060.2280) Fiber design and fabrication; (160.6000) Semiconductor materials. References and links 1. A. C. Peacock, U. J. Gibson, and J. Ballato, “Silicon optical fibers past, present, and future,” Appl. Phys. X 1, 114 (2016). 2. R. He, P. J. A. Sazio, A. C. Peacock, N. Healy, J. R. Sparks, M. Krishnamurthi, V. Gopalan, and J. V. Badding, “Integration of gigahertz-bandwidth semiconductor devices inside microstructured optical fibers,” Nat. Photonics 6, 174 (2012). 3. F. A. Martinsen, B. K. Smeltzer, M. Nord, T. Hawkins, J. Ballato, and U. J. Gibson, “Silicon-core glass fibers as microwire radial-junction solar cells,” Sci. Rep. 4, 6283 (2014). 4. F. H. Suhailin, L. Shen, N. Healy, L. Xiao, M. Jones, T. Hawkins, J. Ballato, U. J. Gibson, and A. C. Peacock, “Tapered polysilicon core fibers for nonlinear photonics,” Opt. Lett. 41, 1360 (2016). 5. J. R. Sparks, R. He, N. Healy, M. Krishnamurthi, A. C. Peacock, P. J. A. Sazio, V. Gopalan, and J. V. Badding, “Zinc Selenide Optical Fibers,” Adv. Mater. 23, 1647 (2011). 6. L. Lagonigro, N. Healy, J. R. Sparks, N. F. Baril, P. J. A. Sazio, J. V. Badding, and A. C. Peacock, “Low loss silicon fibers for photonics applications,” Appl. Phys. Lett. 96, 041105 (2010). 7. J. Ballato, T. Hawkins, P. Foy, R. Stolen, B. Kokuoz, M. Ellison, C. McMillen, J. Reppert, A. M. Rao, M. Daw, S. Sharma, R. Shori, O. Stafsudd, R. R. Rice, and D. R. Powers, “Silicon optical fiber,” Opt. Express 16, 18675 (2008). 8. E. F. Nordstrand, A. N. Dibbs, A. J. Eråker, and U. J. Gibson, “Alkaline oxide interface modifiers for silicon fiber production,” Opt. Mater. Express 3, 651 (2013). 9. C. McMillen, G. Brambilla, S. Morris, T. Hawkins, P. Foy, N. Broderick, E. Koukharenko, R. Rice, and J. Ballato, “On crystallographic orientation in crystal core optical fibers II: Effects of tapering,” Opt. Mat. 35, 93 (2012). 10. J. S. Orcutt, S. D. Tang, S. Kramer, K. Mehta, H. Li, V. Stojanović, and R. J. Ram, “Low-loss polysilicon waveguides fabricated in an emulated high-volume electronics process,” Opt. Express 20, 7243 (2012). 11. D. Kwong, J. Covey, A. Hosseini, Y. Zhang, X. Xu, and R. T. Chen, “Ultralow-loss polycrystalline silicon waveguides and high uniformity 1x12 MMI fanout for 3D photonic integration,” Opt. Express 20, 21722 (2012). 12. S. Shabahang, J. J. Kaufman, D. S. Deng, and A. F. Abouraddy, “Observation of the Plateau-Rayleigh capillary instability in multi-material optical fibers,” Appl. Phys. Lett. 99, 161909 (2011). 13. R. Wang, G. Zhou, Y. Liu, S. Pan, H. Zhang, D. Yu, and Z. Zhang, “Raman spectral study of silicon nanowires: High-order scattering and phonon confinement effects,” Phy. Rev. B 61, 827 (2000). 14. N. Healy, M. Fokine, Y. Franz, T. Hawkins, M. Jones, J. Ballato, A. C. Peacock, and U. J. Gibson, “CO2 laserinduced directional recrystallization to produce single crystal silicon-core optical fibers with low loss,” Adv. Opt. Vol. 7, No. 6 | 1 Jun 2017 | OPTICAL MATERIALS EXPRESS 2055 #285916 https://doi.org/10.1364/OME.7.002055 Journal © 2017 Received 30 Jan 2017; revised 14 Mar 2017; accepted 11 Apr 2017; published 24 May 2017 Mater. 4, 1004 (2016). 15. N. Healy, J. R. Sparks, P. J. A. Sazio, J. V. Badding, and A. C. Peacock , ‘Tapered silicon optical fibers ,” Opt. Express 18, 7596 (2010). 16. B. Scott and G. Pickrell, “Silicon optical fiber diameter dependent grain size,” J. Cryst. Growth 371, 134 (2013). 17. A. C. Peacock, “Soliton propagation in tapered silicon core fibers,” Opt. Lett. 35, 3697 (2010). 18. N. Healy, S. Mailis, N. M. Bulgakova, P. J. A. Sazio, T. D. Day, J. R. Sparks, H. Y. Cheng, J. V. Badding, and A. C. Peacock, “Extreme electronic bandgap modification in laser-crystallized silicon optical fibers,” Nat. Materials 13, 1122 (2014).