Optical Microresonators: Theory, Fabrication, and Applications

John Heebner, Rohit Grover, Tarek Ibrahim (auth.)0387730672, 978-0-387-73067-7, 978-0-387-73068-4

This book explains why microresonators came to be important components in the photonic toolbox. While functionally similar to the Fabry-Perot, microring resonators offer a planar nature which is naturally compatible with monolithic microfabrication technologies.

In these chapters lie the principles required to characterize, design, construct, and implement microresonators as lasers, amplifiers, sensors, filters, demultiplexers, switches, routers, and logic gates. Additionally, much like quantum dots and photonic crystals, it will be shown how microresonators offer an alternative method for creating engineerable materials with designer linear and nonlinear responses tailored for advanced functionalities operating at ultrafast speeds and compact scales.

This is the first detailed text on the theory, fabrication, and applications of optical microresonators, and will be found useful by both graduate students and researchers. With an emphasis on building intuition with distilled equations and graphical illustration, readers will find it to be both an effective learning tool and technical reference.

Table of contents :
Front Matter….Pages i-xiii
Introduction….Pages 1-7
Optical Dielectric Waveguides….Pages 9-70
Optical Microresonator Theory….Pages 71-103
Microring Filters: Experimental Results….Pages 105-121
Nonlinear Optics with Microresonators….Pages 123-148
All-Optical Switching and Logic using Microresonators….Pages 149-174
Distributed Microresonator Systems….Pages 175-216
Fabrication Techniques for Microresonators….Pages 217-242
Back Matter….Pages 243-267