| Compared to fiber optic systems, on-chip optical devices provide reasonable optical performance and mechanical stability in a smaller footprint and at a lower cost. Such devices, including resonators and waveguides, have been applied in diverse areas of scientific research, including quantum information, nonlinear optics, cavity optomechanics, telecommunications, biodetection, rotation sensing, high-stability microwave oscillators, and all-optical signal processing. As performance demands on these applications increase, resonators and waveguides with ultralow propagation loss become critical.;In this thesis, we first demonstrate a new resonator with a record Q factor of 875 million for on-chip devices. The fabrication of our device avoids the requirement for a specialized processing step, which in microtoroid resonators has made it difficult to control their size and achieve millimeter- and centimeter-scale diameters. Attaining these sizes is important in applications such as microcombs. The resonators not only set a new benchmark for the Q factor on a chip, but also provide, for the first time, full compatibility of this important device class with conventional semiconductor processing.;Meanwhile, we demonstrate a monolithic waveguide as long as 27 m (39 m optical path length), and featuring broadband loss rate values of (0.08 +/- 0.01) dB/m measured over 7 m by optical backscattering. Resonator measurements show a further reduction of loss to 0.037 dB/m, close to that of optical fibers when first considered a viable technology. Scaling this waveguide to integrated spans exceeding 250 m and attenuation rates below 0.01 dB/m is discussed. This chip-based waveguide and resonator improve shock resistance, and afford the possibility of integration for system-on-a-chip functionality.;We finally demonstrate a highly sensitive nanoparticle and virus detection method by using a thermal-stabilized reference interferometer in conjunction with an ultrahigh-Q microcavity. Sensitivity is sufficient to resolve shifts caused by binding of individual nanobeads in solution down to a record radius of 12.5 nm, a size approaching that of single protein molecules. A histogram of wavelength shift versus nanoparticle radius shows that particle size can be inferred from shift maxima. |
