Electrically tunable high Q-factor micro-ring resonator based on blue phase liquid crystal cladding

This work demonstrates an electrically tunable silicon nitride (SiN) micro-ring resonator with polymer-stabilized blue phase liquid crystals (PSBPLCs) cladding. An external vertical electric field is applied to modulate the refractive index of the PSBPLCs by exploiting its fast-response Kerr effect-induced birefringence. The consequent change in the refractive index of the cladding can vary the effective refractive index of the micro-ring resonator and shift the resonant wavelength. Crystalline structures of PSBPLCs with a scale of the order of hundreds of nanometers ensure that the resonator has a very low optical loss. The measured tuning range is 0.45 nm for TM polarized light under an applied voltage of 150V and the corresponding response time is in the sub-millisecond range with a Q-factor of greater than 20,000. (C) 2014 Optical Society of America