Broadband opto-electro-mechanical effective refractive index tuning on a chip

Photonic integrated circuits have enabled progressively active functionality in compact devices with the potential for large-scale integration. To date the lowest loss photonic circuits are achieved with silica or silicon nitride-based platforms. However, these materials generally lack reconfigurability. In this work we present a platform for achieving active functionality in any dielectric waveguide via large-scale opto-electro-mechanical tuning of the effective refractive index (Delta n(eff approximate to)0.01-0.1) and phase (Delta phi>2 pi). A suspended microbridge weakly interacts with the evanescent field of a low-mode confinement waveguide to tune the effective refractive index and phase with minimal loss. Metal-coated bridges enable electrostatic actuation to displace the microbridge to dynamically tune n(EFF). In a second implementation we place a non-metallized dielectric microbridge in a gradient electric field to achieve actuation and tuning. Both approaches are broadband, universally applicable to any waveguide, and pave the way for adding active functionality to many passive optical materials.