Hybrid silicon photonics using oxide-free bonding and nanostructured effective materials

Oxide-free bonding of indium phosphide epitaxial layers onto silicon-on-insulator (SOI) offers good thermal and electrical contact. These properties are retained if guidance engineering of the resulting stack is performed by nanostructuring the silicon layer to produce a lower effective index layer. We discuss the optical characterization of such a system by a simple prism deviation method for a thin stack, or diffraction to the air for a more multimode stack, adding a superperiod to the nanostructure.