Precision tuning of silicon nanophotonic devices through post-fabrication processes

In recent years, silicon photonics has begun to transition from research to commercialization. Decades of relentless advances in the field of computing have led to fundamental bottlenecks in the design of computers, especially in interconnect bandwidth density. For IBM, silicon photonics has become a potential technological solution for enabling the future of server systems and cutting-edge supercomputers. For Intel, silicon photonics has become a cost-effective solution for supplying the necessary bandwidth needed by future generations of consumer computing products. While the field of silicon photonics is now advancing at a rapid pace there is still a great deal of research to be done.;This thesis investigates ways of improving the performance of fundamental silicon nanophotonic devices through post-fabrication processes. These devices include numerous optical resonator designs as well as slow-light waveguides. Optical resonators are used to confine photons both spatially and temporally. In recent years, there has been much research, both theoretical and experimental, into improving the design of optical resonators. Improving these devices through fabrication processes has generally been less studied. Optical waveguides are used to guide the flow of photons over chip-level distances. Slow-light waveguides have also been studied by many research groups in recent years and can be applied to an increasingly wide-range of applications.;The work can be divided into several parts: Chapter 1 is an introduction to the field of silicon photonics as well as an overview of the fabrication, experimental and computational techniques used throughout this work. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 describe our investigations into the precision tuning of nanophotonic devices using laser-assisted thermal oxidation and atomic layer deposition. Chapters 5 and 6 describe our investigations into improving the sidewall roughness of silicon photonic devices using hydrogen annealing and excimer laser induced melting. Finally, Chapter 7 describes our investigations into the nonlinear properties of lead chalcogenide nanocrystals.