2D Material Enabled Nonlinear Integrated Photonics

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2019The family of 2D materials has been the topic of intense academic study due to the tight out-of-plane electronic confinement that gives rise to pronounced electronic and optical effects. Many of the effects that have made them popular among the material science and physics communities also makes them appealing in an integrated photonics settings where their strong optical and opto-electronic effects may give rise to transformative devices. This dissertation aims to outline the work I have conducted to illustrate the capacity of monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) for nonlinear integrated photonic devices. I will present work that explores the efficacy of TMDs for nonlinear photonics based on the second-order susceptibility nonlinearity, specifically second-harmonic generation (SHG) devices. A select few of the major contributions to the field of integrated SHG are outlined. These works are then used to frame a theoretic study of TMD based SHG devices, where we predict that patterning the materials will allow for SHG devices with relaxed fabrication tolerances. This is followed by a review of experimental demonstration of cavity enhanced SHG with a silicon micro-resonator and the current progress towards demonstrating the same with silicon nitride micro-resonators