Kyoungsik Yu

Abstract The Fabry-Pérot interferometer, a fundamental component in optoelectronic systems, offers interesting applications such as sensors, lasers, and filters. In this work, we show a tunable Fabry-Pérot cavity consisting of tunable Sagnac loop reflectors (SLRs) and phase shifters based on electrostatic microelectromechanical (MEMS) actuator. The fabrication process of the device is compatible with the standard wafer-level silicon photonics fabrication processes.

The demonstration of spontaneous symmetry breaking in a system consisting of a pair of self-modulated ring resonators is performed. In addition, the critical effect of thermal heating induced by optical absorption is studied, where experimental results with numerical calculations reveal that optical absorption contributing as an optical nonlinearity is greatly dominant over the optical Kerr effect under certain operation speeds, depicting a significant impact on the system performance.

We report on a scalable and programmable integrated Mach–Zehnder interferometer (MZI) with a tunable free spectral range (FSR) and extinction ratio (ER). For the tunable path of the MZI, we designed and utilized a tunable delay line having high flexibility based on silicon photonic microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). By utilizing MEMS, the length of the delay line can be geometrically modified.