posted on 2017-10-03, 00:00authored byRigoberto Castro-Beltrán, Vinh M. Diep, Soheil Soltani, Eda Gungor, Andrea M. Armani
Optical
frequency combs are high repetition rate, broad spectral bandwidth
coherent light sources. These devices have numerous applications in
many fields, ranging from fundamental science to defense. Recently,
low-threshold and small-footprint frequency combs have been demonstrated
using ultrahigh quality factor (Q) whispering gallery
mode resonant cavities. The majority of research in cavity-based combs
has focused on optimizing the Q. An alternative strategy
is to engineer the cavity material to enhance the underlying nonlinear
process for comb generation. In this work, we demonstrate that gold
nanorods coated with a nonlinear material reduce the comb generation
threshold when decorated on the surface of the resonant cavities.
The enhancement mechanism is explored with finite element method modeling
and can be explained in terms of photonic–plasmonic mode hybridization.
A comb span of ∼300 nm in the near-IR range is observed with
incident intensity <2 GW cm–2. The required threshold
for parametric oscillation directly scales with nanorod concentration
and ranges from 148 μW to 1.5 mW, which is 15 times lower than
uncoated silica devices with similar optical performance.