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Flexible control of the modal confinement in silicon photonic waveguides isan appealing feature for many applications, including sensing and hybridintegration of active materials. In most cases, strip waveguides are thepreferred solution to maximize the light interaction with the waveguidesurroundings. However, the only two degrees of freedom in Si strip waveguidesare the width and thickness, resulting in limited flexibility in evanescentfield control. Here, we propose and demonstrate a new strategy that exploitsmetamaterial engineering of the waveguide core and cladding to control theindex contrast in the vertical and horizontal directions, independently. Theproposed dual-material geometry yields a substantially increased calculatedoverlap with the air (0.35) compared to the best-case scenario for a stripwaveguide (0.3). To experimentally demonstrate the potential of this approach,we have implemented dual-metamaterial ring resonators, operating with thetransverse-magnetic polarized mode in 220-nm-thick waveguides with air asupper-cladding. Micro-ring resonators implemented with strip anddual-metamaterial waveguides exhibit the same measured quality factors, near30,000. Having similar measured quality factors and better calculated externalconfinement factors than strip waveguides, the proposed dual-metamaterialgeometry stands as a promising approach to control modal confinement in siliconwaveguides.

Shaping the modal confinement in silicon nanophotonic waveguides through dual-metamaterial engineering