A silicon oxynitride platform for linear and nonlinear NIR photonics

We present a novel, low loss, integrated photonic platform based on silicon oxynitride (SiON) channel waveguides, capable to manage a wide range of VIS-NIR wavelengths for both linear and nonlinear optics applications. The proposed platform shows promising properties for a wide range of applications in on-chip sensing, LIDAR and integrated quantum photonic technologies. The propagation losses of the realized waveguides, characterized in a linear regime, are below 1.8 dB/cm at a wavelength of 800nm. The nonlinear optical properties of the platform have been characterized, in the wavelength range from 740nm to 840nm, by studying the broadening of picosecond laser pulses in Self-Phase-Modulation process. The resulting nonlinear coefficient n2 varies between 6 and 14 x 10^(-20) m^2/W within the studied spectral range, showing a clear increasing trend while approaching the half value of the silicon oxynitride band gap (Eg~4eV).