Study of crystalline defect induced optical scattering loss inside photonic waveguides in UV-visible spectral...

In this work, we study the crystalline defect induced optical scattering loss inside photonic waveguide. Volume current method is implemented with a close form of dyadic Green's function derived. More specifically, threading dislocation induced scattering loss inside AlN waveguides in UV-visible spectrum wavelengths are studied since this material is intrinsically accompanied with high densities of dislocations (typically on order of 10⁸-10¹⁰cm^-2). The results from this study reveal that threading dislocations contribute significant amount of scattering loss when material is not MOCVD grown. Additionally, the scattering loss is strongly dependent on polarization and waveguide geometries: TM modes exhibit higher scattering loss compared with TE modes, and the multimode large core waveguides are more susceptible to threading dislocations compared with single mode waveguides and high-aspect-ratio waveguides. Conclusions from this work can be supported by several recently published investigations on III-N based photonic devices. The model derived from this work can also be easily altered to fit other material systems with other types of crystalline defects.