Aluminum nitride on insulator (AlNOI) platform for mid-infrared photonics

Abstract

We report an aluminum nitride on insulator platform for mid-infrared (MIR) photonics applications beyond 3 μm. Propagation loss and bending loss are studied, while functional devices such as directional couplers, multimode interferometers, and add/drop filters are demonstrated with high performance. The complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor-compatible aluminum nitride offers advantages ranging from a large transparency window, high thermal and chemical resistance, to piezoelectric tunability and three-dimensional integration capability. This platform can have synergy with other photonics platforms to enable novel applications for sensing and thermal imaging in MIR.