Lightwave circuit elements based on microsphere resonators and meandering waveguides

The microspheres, with their high quality factor morphology dependent resonances (MDRs), are ideal optical resonators for three dimensional volumetric lightwave circuits. The microsphere leads itself to various lightwave circuit element applications such as channel dropping filters [1], tunable filters [2], optical modulators [3], and dynamic tuners [4]. So far we have realized these applications using silicon spheres coupled with optical fiber half couplers manufactured from single mode optical fibers. Biosensing might also be realized with these silicon microsphere resonators [5]. On the integrated optics side, we recently introduced distributed feedback (DFB) meandering waveguides as novel integrated optical elements [6]. We analyzed silicon DFB meandering waveguides, which can exhibit a variety of spectral responses such as coupled resonator induced transparency (CRIT) filter, Fano resonator, hitless filter, Lorentzian filter, Rabi splitter, self-coupled optical waveguide (SCOW), and tunable power divider. In this talk, we will focus on the properties of silicon spherical resonators and distributed feedback (DFB) meandering waveguides and their potential as lightwave components.