Electric-field poling of silicon nitride waveguides for the linear phase modulation

Stoichiometric silicon nitride (Si3N4) constitutes a mature platform for integrated photonics. Its pertinent properties, including wide transparency window from the visible to the mid-IR, low propagation loss, and high third-order nonlinearity, are exploited in many linear and nonlinear applications. However, due to the centrosymmetric nature of the Si3N4, the absence of the second-order susceptibility (chi((2))) impedes a realization of three-wave mixing processes as well as the linear electro-optic effect, relevant for many applications on an optical chip. Here, we implement the electric-field poling technique to induce the effective chi((2)) inside a Si3N4 waveguide, thus enabling the linear electro-optic modulation. Using numerical simulations, we estimated the concentration and the diffusion coefficient of the charges responsible for the space-charge electric field formation. In addition, the DC third-order susceptibility of Si3N4 previously unknown in the literature is measured using a free-space Mach-Zehnder interferometer.