Investigation of the thermo-optic effect in doubly coupled photonic crystal split-beam nanocavities

We design and experimentally demonstrate doubly coupled photonic crystal split-beam nanocavities. The thermal response of the coupled nanocavities is characterized by controlling the device temperature: the resonant wavelengths of the odd mode (1557.28 nm) and even mode (1567.18 nm) are both redshifted linearly from 17.4 °C to 46.5 °C. The tuning ratio of the two modes is measured to be 97.4%, implying that they respond almost the same to temperature changes. Therefore, changes of the wavelength difference between this pair of modes can be applied to effectively decouple the thermo-optic effect from the optomechanical effect without on-chip temperature self-referencing. Additionally, the topmost quality-factor approaches 28 300 throughout the thermal tuning. The proposed structure paves the way for studying purely optomechanical actuations. (paper)