Silicon photonics is the opportunity that one of the most amazing materials in nature, silicon, has offered once its electronic technological possibilities are reaching its limit. The transparency of this material in the near and mid infrared, along with the extensively developed manufacturing processes, opens the door to the miniaturisation of complex optical systems used in innumerable applications. Ultra-fast communications with low power consumption or highly selective and sensible sensors are some of the most promising ones.
In this thesis the optical properties of silicon have been exploded from two differentiated perspectives: the study of macroporous silicon photonic crystals applied to selective gas detection, and the development of in-house fabrication process for integrated silicon photonic circuits. In the first part of the thesis, devoted to macroporous silicon photonic crystal, efforts have been focused on understanding the multiple sources of distortion of the optical response of the same as well as the improvement of some figures of merit such as bandgap width, quality factor or transmittance. The improvement of these figures of merit could lead to the obtaining of photonic structures with potential selective light filtering market applications, in our case, focused to spectroscopic gas detection.
On the other hand, in the second part of the thesis, a prospective work on the development of a standardised in-house fabrication-simulation-measurement process has been performed. In our group, and as far as I now at UPC, there was no previous knowledge on the fabrication of these devices. Therefore, we have had to develop all the fabrication/measurement protocols and measurement tools. With these processes optimized, different resonating optical structures have been obtained with high quality factors and relatively low losses. This thesis opens the door to the in-house fabrication of more complex optical circuits, which can be used to many applications, such as integrated optical gas sensors or beam stirring of THz antennas.
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