Optical nonlinearity enhancement in a silicon-organic hybrid slot microring resonator

Silicon photonic integrated devices that rely on optical nonlinear effects play a vital role in all-optical signal processing, optical computing, optical routing and so on. However, the practical use of these devices is limited due to the low Kerr nonlinear index of silicon and high nonlinear loss associated with two-photon absorption (TPA) and TPA-induced free carrier absorption (FCA) in the near-infrared band. In this paper, we propose and numerically demonstrate the optical nonlinear enhancement of silicon-organic hybrid slot microring, which consists of an ultra-narrow slot microring coated with highly nonlinear organic material MEH-PPV. The degenerate four-wave mixing (DFWM) spectra show that the FWM conversion efficiency is improved by 12 dB compared to a silicon microring of the same size. This improvement further indicates that the nonlinear coefficient of the proposed device is up to $1.45\times 10^{6}\mathrm{W}^{-1}k\mathrm{m}^{-1}$. We show that this device’s nonlinear enhancement capability has great potential for applications in all-optical signal processing, high-performance optical switching and optical computing.