Design and characterization of silicon nanocrystal microgear resonators

We report on the design, optimization and characterization of silicon nanocrystal microgear resonators. We present three-dimensional finite-difference time-domain simulations to optimize the gear geometry and guide our experimental study. We fabricated a series of microgears with varying geometry and compared their photoluminescence spectra to that of a reference microdisk. The microgears exhibited a single dominant mode in the photoluminescence spectrum with quality factors as high as 103. We further demonstrated the ability to tune the wavelength of the dominant mode by changing the number of gear teeth and thereby selecting a mode with a different azimuthal order.