Subwavelength materials have become a fundamental tool for silicon photonic design, enabling devices with unique performance characteristics. We will briefly review some fundamentals here and will then discuss some of the latest advances in the field, with a particular focus on polarization handling. Furthermore, we will discuss advances in integrated optical sensing, addressing both fundamental issues such as the optimization of detection limits, as well as state-of-the-art results with novel sensing architectures. We will also discuss which benefits subwavelength structures can provide in such sensors.
Silicon photonic waveguides patterned at the subwavelength level behave as metamaterials whose optical properties, including refractive index, dispersion and anisotropy can be tuned by judiciously designing the subwavelength geometry. Over the past years, the added design freedom afforded by these structures has enabled a wide variety of novel high performance devices, ranging from high efficiency fibre-to-chip couplers, to on-chip polarization and mode management, and ultra-broadband waveguide couplers covering several optical communication bands. In this invited keynote talk we will revisit the physical foundations of these structures, explore some of the latest advances in the field with applications in both telecommunications and sensing, and discuss some of the outstanding challenges to move these structures from research labs to large-scale commercialisation.
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