Very high efficiency optical coupler for silicon nanophotonic waveguide and single mode optical fiber

Integrated optical circuits are poised to open up an array of novel applications. A vibrant field of research has emerged around the monolithic integration of optical components onto the silicon substrates. Typically, single mode optical fibers deliver the external light to the chip, and submicron single-mode waveguides then guide the light on-chip for further processing. For such technology to be viable, it is critically important to be able to efficiently couple light into and out of the chip platform, and between the different components, with low losses. Due to the large volume mismatch between a fiber and silicon waveguide (on the order of 600), it has been extremely challenging to obtain high coupling efficient with large tolerance. To date, demonstrated coupling has been relatively lossy and effective coupling requires impractical alignment of optical components. Here, we propose the use of a high contrast metastructure (HCM) that overcomes these issues, and effectively couples the off-chip, out-of-plane light waves into on-chip, in-plane waveguides. By harnessing the resonance properties of the metastructure, we show that it is possible to spatially confine the incoming free-space light into subwavelength dimensions with a near-unity (up to 98%) efficiency. The underlying coupling mechanism is analyzed and designs for practical on-chip coupler and reflector systems are presented. Furthermore, we explore the two-dimensional HCM as an ultra-compact wavelength multiplexer with superior efficiency (90%).