Amorphous silicon nanowires combining high nonlinearity, FOM and optical stability

We demonstrate optically stable amorphous silicon nanowires with both high nonlinear figure of merit (FOM) of ~5 and high nonlinearity Re(y) = 1200W-1m-1. We observe no degradation in these parameters over the entire course of our experiments including systematic study under operation at 2 W coupled peak power (i.e. ~2GW/cm2) over timescales of at least an hour.