A temperature-tunable etalon for optical telecommunication wavelength

Members

Shi Yicheng (A0054800R), Du Jinyi (A0227185B), Zhang Qian(A0228752Y)

Rationale

A Fabry-Perot interferometer (or an Etalon), being probably the simplest form of all interferometers, is found useful in various applications such as spectral filtering or frequency referencing.

An etalon is typically constructed out of the two parallel reflecting surfaces of a transparent plate. The plate needs to have low absorption loss for the desired working wavelengths to ensure a relatively high finesse of the etalon. The material choice for visible wavelengths is usually fused silica with a relatively low absorption coefficient of [bla] and a thermal expansion coefficient of [bla].

For optical telecommunication wavelengths, which range from about 1260nm to 1625nm, pure silicon becomes a more practical choice. Polished silicon wafers can be easily purchased at different thickness (100μm to a few mm), which allows for various free spectral ranges. The absorption coefficient of silicon is about $6\times 10^{-5}$/cm at 1310nm. Given this low absorption loss at the telecom wavelength, it is possible in principle to build etalons with high finesse by applying Highly Reflective coatings to the two surfaces of a silicon wafer.

The thermal expansion coefficient of silicon is $2.6\times 10^{-6}$/K, which translates to a thickness change of merely 0.26nm/K for a 100μm wafer. On the other hand, the refractive index of silicon has a temperature dependence of $\frac{dn}{dT}\approx 2\times 10^{-4}$/K, which is two orders of magnitude higher than the thermal expansion coefficient. It is also independent of the thickness which suggests that the transmission wavelengths of the etalon is tunable even for a very thin piece.

Characteristic Parameters of an Etalon

A very quick intro to Fabry-Perot interferometer is here: How does an etalon work?. Alternatively one can turn to literally any text books on interferometry.

A bare silicon wafer as an etalon

Setup

The 100um-silicon wafer act as the etalon in this design. The small piece wafer is stick on a copper block and the light can transmit through the thin hole on the copper block. There is a Partier pad on the bottom of the copper so that we can stabilize and change temperature. The whole setup is put in a transparent plastic box for minimizing the influence of the environmental temperature change.

A few photos for now.

Bare Silicon Wafer

Temperature Tuning of silicon etalon

A small piece of the silicon wafer is mounted on a copper block with a 4mm diameter hole through hole. The copper serves as a thermally conductive mount for the silicon etalon and is placed on top of a Peltier stage. The temperature of this entire stack is adjusted and stabilized with a TEC controller. A few different temperatures were tried. Just to quickly note that the thermal expansion coefficient of silicon is $\frac{1}{l}\frac{dl}{dT}\approx 2.6\times 10^{-6}{\text{K}}^{-1}$ ([1]).

Besides the thermal expansion of the etalon, the refractive index of silicon also changes with varying temperature. One report of the thermal-optic coefficient $\frac{dn}{dT}$ of silicon can be found here([2]), which states a coefficient $\frac{dn}{dT}\approx 2\times 10^{-4}{\text{K}}^{-1}$. Do note that the thermal-optical coefficient is two orders of magnitude larger than the thermal expansion coefficient, which suggest that the change in refractive index is the main contribution towards wavelength tuning of this etalon.

The shift of transmission center wavelength of a fringe can be expressed as: $\frac{d\lambda }{dT}=\lambda (\frac{1}{n}\frac{dn}{dT}+\frac{1}{l}\frac{dl}{dT})\approx 0.079\text{nm/K}$ for 1310nm.

We adjusted the temperature finer, taking 15 transmission intensities under different temperature between 25 and 55. We have linearly fitted the shift of the central wavelength with temperature and find that they are perfectly linearly. The result shows that the central wavelength will shift 0.1nm when the temperature changes by 1 celsius degree.

HR Coated Silicon Wafer

We wrote some MATLAB codes to simulate the performance of high reflection coating. Here, we are using a six-layer coating. The first layer from the air is the Si3N4, 163nm for thickness. After that, is the SiO2 layer, 226nm for thickness. Then the Si3N4 (163nm), SiO2 (226nm), Si3N4 (163nm), SiO2 (226nm).

The reflective index of the coating should be as below:

When the thickness of all the layers is correct, the reflection spectrum should have a peak at a wavelength around 1310nm. The reflection peak should reach 90%. If so, our etalon would have high finesse and can act as a very useful filter for high bandwidth lasers.

Silicon Coating Speed Calibrating

Sputtering speed depends not only on the input RF power but also related to the distance between the target and the sample. and the surface area of the sample. We have to calibrate the sputtering speed to make sure the thickness of the film we coated is correctly equal to a quarter lambda or a half lambda. We sputtered silicon film on the optical window to measure the thickness of different sputtering time. In this calibration experiment, we are using 100w power for RF signal, and the distance between the target and the sample is about 8cm, while the diameter of the glass (Optical Window) is 25.4mm. We tried for 6000s, 8000s, 10000s, 12000s, 20000s.

The estimated speed is drawn in the graph with dashed lines.