Nonlinear Optical Bistability in Microring Resonators for Enhanced Phase Sensing

Photonic microring resonators are used in a variety of chip-integrated sensing applications where they allow one to measure transmission intensity changes upon external signals with a sensitivity that scales linearly with the Q factor. In this work, we suggest exploiting the nonlinear self-phase-modulation effect to increase the overall sensitivity by an additional gain factor appearing when the operational point of the nonlinear resonator is chosen just at the crossover from the monostable to the bistable regime. We present the theoretical idea together with a first proof of concept experiment displaying a gain factor of 22 on a chip-integrated silicon-nitride resonator.