High Kerr nonlinearity hydrogenated amorphous silicon nanowires with low two photon absorption and high optical stability

Abstract

We demonstrate optically stable amorphous silicon nanowires with both high nonlinear figure of merit (FOM) of ~5 and high nonlinearity Re({\gamma}) = 1200W-1m-1. We observe no degradation in these parameters over the entire course of our experiments including systematic study under operation at 2 W coupled peak power (i.e. ~2GW/cm2) over timescales of at least an hour.