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In recent decades, silicon photonics has attracted intensive research interest in optical communications due to its advantageous compact dimensions and high-volume manufacturability. Particularly, micro-ring resonators on silicon-oninsulator (SOI) platform have been widely exploited as a basic building block for a vast range of applications such as switches, modulators, and sensors. A majority of these applications involve light-matter interaction, which can be substantially enhanced by the high quality factor micro-ring resonators. However, conventional strip waveguide based micro-ring resonators suffer from the intrinsic dilemma in achieving high light confinement and strong light-matter interaction simultaneously. Subwavelength grating (SWG) waveguides, comprised of periodically interleaved high and low refractive index materials with a pitch less than one wavelength, have been demonstrated as a promising alternative. For SWG waveguides built on SOI wafers, the ratio of silicon and cladding materials can be engineered microscopically to achieve desired macroscopic properties. The control of these properties could potentially lead to significant performance improvements compared with conventional micro-ring resonators based photonic devices, such as filters and sensors. However, SWG waveguide based micro-ring resonators (SWGMRs) that have been demonstrated so far can only provide a moderate quality factor (~5600) with a large radius (e.g. 15 μm), which greatly jeopardize the wide spread research efforts in this area. In this paper, we propose to use trapezoidal silicon pillars to reduce the bend loss of SWGMRs to improve the quality factor. For the first time, we experimentally demonstrate the smallest SWGMR (the micro-ring radius equals to 5 μm) with an applicable quality factor as high as 11,500. This approach also can be applied to SWGMRs with larger radii for higher quality factors. We also experimentally demonstrated a 10 μm radius SWGMR that can provide a quality factor up to 45,000. Compared to SWGMRs built with conventional rectangular silicon pillars, the quality factors is increased by 4.6 times from a 5 μm radius SWGMR and 3 times from a 10 μm SWGMR radius, respectively.
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