High-Q nanobeam cavities on a silicon

nitride platform enabled by slow light

Cite as: APL Photonics 5, 066101 (2020); https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0007279
Submitted: 10 March 2020 . Accepted: 04 May 2020 . Published Online: 02 June 2020

Jiahao Zhan, Zeinab Jafari, Sylvain Veilleux, Mario Dagenais, and Israel De Leon

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APL Photonics 5, 066101 (2020); https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0007279 5, 066101

© 2020 Author(s).
 APL Photonics ARTICLE scitation.org/journal/app

High-Q nanobeam cavities on a silicon nitride

platform enabled by slow light
Cite as: APL Photon. 5, 066101 (2020); doi: 10.1063/5.0007279
Submitted: 10 March 2020 • Accepted: 4 May 2020 •
Published Online: 2 June 2020

Jiahao Zhan,1 Zeinab Jafari,2 Sylvain Veilleux,3 Mario Dagenais,1,a) and Israel De Leon2,b)

AFFILIATIONS
1
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA
2
School of Engineering and Sciences, Tecnológico de Monterrey, Monterrey, Nuevo Leon 64849, Mexico
3
Department of Astronomy, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA

a)
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed: dage@ece.umd.edu
b)
Electronic mail: ideleon@tec.mx

ABSTRACT
Silicon nitride integrated photonic devices benefit from a wide working spectral range covering the visible and near-infrared spectra, which
in turn enables important applications in bio-photonics, optical communications, and sensing. High-quality factor optical resonators are
essential photonic devices for such applications. However, implementing such resonators on a silicon nitride platform is quite challenging
due to the low refractive index contrast attainable with this material. Here, we demonstrate that silicon nitride photonic cavities compris-
ing a slow-light waveguide bounded by mirrors can in principle exhibit quality factors in the order of several millions despite a relatively
low refractive index contrast. We show that the energy stored in such a slow-light cavity exhibits a cubic dependence on the cavity length,
which can enable extremely large quality factors with modest-length cavities. We present the design and experimental characterization of
silicon nitride slow-light nanobeam-type cavities. Two sets of nanobeam cavities were fabricated to experimentally verify the cubic depen-
dence of the Q factor on the cavity length. The highest measured Q factor in our devices is 4.42 × 105 , which is limited by fabrication
imperfections.
© 2020 Author(s). All article content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0007279., s

I. INTRODUCTION
Optical cavities with a high quality factor (Q factor) are of
great importance in various applications, such as narrow-band filter-
ing, ultra-low energy switching and modulation, sensing, and cavity
quantum electrodynamics.1–5 In particular, nanobeam cavities (one-
dimensional photonic crystal cavities) have attracted much atten-
tion because they can achieve large Q factors in addition to offer-
ing design flexibility and relatively simple fabrication.6,7 Recently,
silicon nitride (SiN) nanobeam cavities have been proposed, bring-
ing advantages over their silicon counterparts such as a broader
operation range covering the visible and the near-infrared spectra
and the absence of two-photon absorption in the telecommunica-
tion band.8–10 Nonetheless, the low refractive index of this material
poses challenges to achieving high Q factors because of the lower
index-contrast attainable compared to silicon.11–14 To improve their
Q factor, most SiN nanobeam cavity designs to date have resorted
to using suspended (air-cladded) architectures, reporting measured
Q factors in the range of 104 –105 .15–17 However, the increased Q
factors come at the cost of a more complex fabrication process
and structural fragility. A recent effort to tackle this problem has
reported an encapsulated SiN nanobeam cavity design with theoret-
ical and measured Q factors of ∼105 and 7000, respectively.12 While
this represents important progress, more work is still required to
achieve Q factors comparable to those of suspended SiN or silicon
nanobeam cavities while maintaining the device’s ease of fabrication
and structural robustness.
In this work, we use the concept of slow light to show, both
theoretically and experimentally, significant enhancements in the
Q factor of SiN cavities. Slow light refers to optical modes with a
small group velocity. There are two standard mechanisms to gen-
erate slow light, both of which require spectral regions of high

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© Author(s) 2020
 APL Photonics
dispersion. One of them uses material dispersion such as that created
near an atomic resonance, while the other uses structural dispersion
such as that created in photonic crystals.18 Slow-light waveguides of
both types have been used in the past to increase the photon lifetime
in various cavities,19–24 showing that the Q factor increases with the
group index, ng . However, despite its potential, this approach has
not been thoroughly investigated, thus far overseeing aspects such
as the effect of the cavity length on the cavity performance. Here, we
show experimentally that nanobeam cavities incorporating a slow-
light photonic crystal waveguide exhibit a Q factor that increases
with the cube of the cavity length (as opposed to the characteris-
tic linear dependence of standard cavities25 ), enabling the design of
high-Q SiN nanobeam cavities with modest footprints despite a low
refractive index contrast. Using this approach, we report experimen-
tal measurements of Q factors as large as 4.42 × 105 and theoreti-
cal estimations of several millions for glass-cladded SiN nanobeam
cavities. These values are the largest Q factors reported to date for
non-suspended SiN nanobeam cavities, and are comparable to those
reported in suspended nanobeam cavities.15–17 Furthermore, our
numerical simulations indicate that the Purcell factor of these slow-
light cavities increases quadratically with the cavity length despite
the increased mode volume, which could be useful for applications
involving molecule sensing and strong interaction with quantum
emitters.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. In Sec. II,
the principles of operation, cavity design, and simulation results are
discussed. In Secs. III and IV, the experimental results are presented
and discussed, respectively. In Sec. V, the major conclusions are
summarized.
II. PRINCIPLE OF OPERATION AND CAVITY DESIGN
One of the techniques used to increase the Q factor in optical
cavities is based on utilizing a slow-light medium inside the cavi-
ties.19–24 The enhanced photon lifetime in the slow-light medium,
which is a consequence of an increased ng and a reduced group
velocity, augments the Q factor. In a structural slow-light waveg-
uide, it is feasible to increase ng by changing the structural param-
eters of the waveguide and adjusting the slope of the band at the
wavelength of interest. Nonetheless, as we discuss below, the Q fac-
tor of a slow-light cavity (slow-light waveguide bounded by mir-
rors) also depends critically on the cavity length (L). To obtain an
understanding of the basic physical mechanism leading to the Q-
factor enhancement in such a cavity, we first consider a simple case
of a 1D waveguide with periodic index variation in the form of
n(x) = n0 + n1 cos(2πx/Λ), where n1 is small compared to n0 . The
stored energy in such a structure is given by26
κ2 /γL cosh γL sinh γL − (Ω/ν)2
U = U0 [ ], (1)
γ2 cosh2 γL + (Ω/ν)2 sinh2 γL
where U0 = 12 ε0 n20 E02 AL is the energy stored in an unstructured
waveguide of the same length, L is the length of the waveguide,
ν = c/n0 is the phase velocity of light in the background material,
κ is the coupling strength, Ω √ = ω − ω0 is the detuning from the
Bragg frequency, and γ = κ2 − (Ω/ν)2 . After some brief alge-
braic calculations, the quality factor at resonances where γL = imπ is
APL Photon. 5, 066101 (2020); doi: 10.1063/5.0007279
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found as
U UC κ 2 3
Qm = ωm = ωm [L + ( ) L ], (2)
P P mπ
where UC = U0 /L = 12 ε0 n20 E02 A is a constant and P is the power dis-
sipation. Assuming that the loss of the waveguide is small and hence
considering a constant P, the Q factor scales with the cube of the cav-
ity length L. Equation (2) clearly shows that it is possible to enhance
the Q factor by modestly increasing the length of the cavity. Note
that the L3 dependence of Q is not expected for slow-light cavities
based on slow light resulting from material dispersion.19
Although the analysis leading to Eq. (2) considers a small sinu-
soidal index variation, a similar result is expected for more compli-
cated periodic patterns. To verify the validity of Eq. (2) for other
cavities, we perform 2.5D finite-difference time domain (FDTD)
simulations (Lumerical) on three slow-light waveguides with differ-
ent group indices (ng = 24, ng = 14, and ng = 7) and examine the
effects of ng and L on the Q factor. The designed slow-light waveg-
uides are made of SiN strip waveguides periodically patterned with
elliptical holes spaced by a distance of Λ = 515 nm. SiN is modeled by
the Sellmeier equation given in Ref. 27 to take into account the mate-
rial dispersion. Since the material absorption of our low-pressure
chemical vapor deposition (LPCVD) SiN is vanishingly small, it is
neglected in the simulation. The elliptical shape of the holes results
in a wider stopband and a larger mirror reflectivity compared to
the circular one.28 The cross section of the waveguides is 1200 ×
300 nm2 , which is chosen to support only the fundamental trans-
verse modes (TE and TM) maintaining at the same time a good
mode confinement. The entire structure is encapsulated in SiO2 ,
having substrate and upper-cladding thicknesses of 10 μm and 4 μm,
respectively.
The band structures of the three slow-light waveguide designs
are plotted in Fig. 1(a). Only the first two bands corresponding to
the dielectric mode (solid line) and the air mode (dashed line) are
shown. For the dielectric mode, most of the mode power is confined
in the high index material. Thus, larger Q factors could be obtained
for this mode in comparison to the air mode for which most of the
power is in the low index material. To define a cavity, we simply
truncate the number of holes in the slow-light waveguides, N W , as
shown in the inset of Fig. 1(b). This acts as a uniform-reflectivity
mirror because the effective indices of the waveguide mode do not
vary much over the wavelength range of interest. As can be inferred
from Fig. 1(a), the first band (solid line) of the three waveguides is
far away from the light cone (gray region), meaning that the radi-
ation loss to the light cone is negligible for all the cavities. Thus,
the contribution of the radiation loss and mirror reflection to the
Q factor is decoupled from that of ng . Figure 1(b) illustrates how
the Q factor of the fundamental TE mode in each of these three
cavities is enhanced as N W is increased. As expected from our previ-
ous analysis leading to Eq. (2), the simulation results fit the form
Q = aNW 3
+ bNW very well (note that L scales linearly with N W
as L = ΛN W ; here we have replaced L with N W ). It is also worth
noting that the larger the ng is, the larger the Q factor is for a
constant L.
For further analysis, we use the slow-light waveguide with the
largest group index (ng = 24 obtained for the hole radii of 500 nm
and 110 nm) in the remaining of this paper. To achieve high Q fac-
tors, the slow-light waveguide (with N W holes) is bounded by Bragg
5, 066101-2
 APL Photonics
FIG. 1. (a) Band structures of one unit cell in various slow-light waveguides with ng
= 24 obtained for the hole radii of 500 nm and 110 nm, ng = 14 obtained for the hole
radii of 200 nm and 110 nm, and ng = 7 obtained for the hole radii of 100 nm and
110 nm. The solid (dashed) lines refer to the dielectric (air) mode, the gray regions
show the light cone, and the red dots illustrate the operating frequencies of the
cavities made of these slow-light waveguides. (b) The Q factor of the fundamental
resonant mode (TE polarization) vs NW in the three cavities made of the slow-light
waveguides with different ng . The inset shows the geometry of the cavities.
mirrors on both sides (with N M holes each) to form a nanobeam
cavity, as depicted in Fig. 2(a). Two tapers (with N T holes each) are
used between the slow-light waveguide and the mirrors to adiabati-
cally match their mode profiles and minimize scattering losses.6 The
minor and major radii of the holes in the mirror sections are 60 nm
and 200 nm, respectively. The hole parameters in the taper sections
are adjusted to create a quadratic tapering of the filling factor and an
exponential decay of the fields along the tapers.6 The magnetic field
distributions of the fundamental TE resonant mode in the proposed
cavity for three different N W values of 40, 120, and 160 are plotted
in Fig. 2(b). These field profiles are given for a constant number of
holes in the taper and mirror sections (N T = 80 and N M = 60). The
Q factor vs N W for the same number of holes in the taper and mir-
ror sections is also depicted in Fig. 2(c). The Q factor varies, again,
with the cube of L and a high Q factor of ∼1.7 × 107 is achieved at
a wavelength of ∼1627 nm for N W = 200. It should be noted that
even larger Q factors are predicted by adding more holes to the mir-
ror sections (For instance, a Q factor of ∼2.8 × 107 is obtained for
N M = 70).
Finally, we estimate how the effective area of the mode
in the (x, z) plane, A, scales with the cavity length and is
APL Photon. 5, 066101 (2020); doi: 10.1063/5.0007279
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FIG. 2. (a) Top view of the proposed nanobeam cavity made of a slow-light waveg-
uide with NW holes between two sets of taper and mirror with NT and NM holes,
respectively. (b) Magnitude of the magnetic field |H| of the fundamental resonant
mode in cavities with NW of 40, 120, and 160, respectively. The scale bar rep-
resents 5 μm. (c) The Q factor and effective mode area vs NW . Red dots are
the Q factor found by FDTD simulations and the blue curve shows the fitting to
3
Q = aNW + bNW .
calculated by
( ∣H∣2 dA)2
A= ∫ , (3)
∫ ∣H∣ dA
4
where H is the magnetic field vector.29 Figure 2(c) plots the value of
A as a function of N W as obtained from FDTD simulations. Contrary
to the cubic scaling of the Q factor, the effective mode area follows
a linear trend. Note that the same linear trend is expected for the
mode volume, V. Hence, the Purcell factor of the cavity, Pf ∝ Q/V,
exhibits a quadratic dependence on the cavity length.
III. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
We fabricated a set of devices of different parameters (N W ,
N T , and N M ) using the structural specification detailed in Sec. II.
Details of the fabrication procedure are given in Sec. VI. Since the
nanobeam cavities are designed for TE polarization, when charac-
terizing their performances, excess TM polarization is not desired.
To eliminate unwanted TM light caused by our laser source and
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 APL Photonics
FIG. 3. (a) SEM image of a segment of a TM polarization filter. (b) SEM image of
a segment of a slow-light waveguide. (c) Schematic of the experimental setup to
characterize the fabricated devices.
polarization optics, an on-chip TM filter was also implemented in
addition to the nanobeam cavities. This allowed us to obtain a large
TE/TM ratio of at least 50 dB required to observe the spectra of the
TE resonant modes under study (see the supplementary material for
FIG. 4. (a) Measured transmission spectra of a nanobeam cavity with NW = 200, NT = 80, and NM = 60 for TE polarization. The blue and red curves correspond to the results
obtained from a coarse sweeping of the tunable laser with a 2 pm step size and a fine sweeping with a 0.2 pm step size, respectively. (b) Zoom-in of the resonant peak
indicated by the black arrow in (a), with the measured linewidth. (c) Measured transmission spectra of the same cavity for TM polarization. (d) Zoom-in of the resonant peak
indicated by the black arrow in (c), with the measured linewidth.
APL Photon. 5, 066101 (2020); doi: 10.1063/5.0007279
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how the residual polarization can affect the transmission spectrum).
For the TM polarization filter, we chose periodical circular holes as a
grating, and by adjusting its period, we can align its stopband around
the edge of the TE bandgap of the nanobeam cavity, where resonant
peaks are located. Scanning-electron micrographs of a section of a
TM filter and a section of a nanobeam cavity are shown in Figs. 3(a)
and 3(b), respectively.
The measurement of fabricated devices was performed using
the experimental setup as schematically drawn in Fig. 3(c). We
use a tunable laser source operating in the 1450–1640 nm wave-
length range and a power meter. The fiber rotator in Fig. 3(c) con-
trols the input polarization. A butt-coupling technique is applied
to couple light into the chip from a polarization-maintaining fiber,
and the input waveguide width is optimized for the maximum
coupling efficiency.30 An index-matching liquid is also applied to
minimize reflection losses. The offset between the input and out-
put waveguides is to avoid stray light coupling into the output
fiber.
Figure 4 plots the measured transmission spectra of a
nanobeam cavity with N W = 200, N T = 80, and N M = 60 for both
polarizations, respectively. The blue and red curves correspond to
the measurement results obtained from the coarse and fine sweep-
ing of the tunable laser, respectively. The two shaded regions mark
the locations of the stopband of the designed TM polarization filter.
Clearly, TE resonant peaks are revealed with a large contrast of at
least 50 dB, due to the proper alignment of the TM filter stopband
with those TE resonant peaks.
It is worth mentioning that although the nanobeam cavities
are originally designed for TE polarization, they do have some
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TABLE I. List of parameters and highest measured Q factors of fabricated nanobeam

cavities.

Geometrical parameters Highest measured Q

NW NT NM TE TM

120 60 50 2.79 × 105 8.16 × 104

160 60 80 3.79 × 105 1.46 × 105
200 60 80 4.09 × 105 1.56 × 105
200 80 60 4.42 × 105 1.88 × 105
200 80 70 3.19 × 105 2.04 × 105

TM resonances as well, as indicated by the peaks appearing in the

1540–1560 nm wavelength range. However, we note that the Q fac-
tors are lower for TM polarization because the effective index of
the TM-polarized mode of the cavity is smaller than that for the TE
polarization.
For TE polarization, the resonant peak at 1604.7 nm has
a 3-dB linewidth of 3.63 pm, corresponding to a Q factor
of 4.42 × 105 , with a transmission of −48.7 dB. The highest
measured Q factor for TM polarization of the same cavity is
1.88 × 105 (with a 3-dB linewidth of 8.18 pm at 1542.8 nm).
The measured Q factors for all fabricated devices are listed in
Table I.
To experimentally verify the cubic relation between the Q fac-
tor and cavity length, we fabricated two sets of nanobeam cavities
with (I) N M = N T = 15 and (II) N M = N T = 25 and N W increas-
ing from 40 to 220 for both sets. Then, we measured the highest
Q factor of the TE resonant modes in the first set, and the high-
est Q factor of the TM resonant modes in the second set [note that
the derivation of Eq. (2) does not require a specific polarization].
The two sets have different N M and N T values in order to keep
the Q factors in a similar regime (<∼2.5 × 104 ) for both polariza-
tions. From Figs. 5(a) and 5(b), we observe a nonlinear dependence
of Q on N W .
We find that for both polarizations, the experimental data fol-
low a cubic dependence for a limited range of cavity lengths, as indi-
cated by the shaded areas in Figs. 5(a) and 5(b). The blue curves in
the two figures are fits of the cubic expression Q = aNW 3
+ bNW to the
data points in the shaded areas. Figures 5(c) and 5(d) are zoom-ins
of the shaded areas to show the associated data points and fits. Note
that in this regime of relatively low Q, the data fit (SSE of 1 and 0.469
and R-squared of 0.9972 and 0.9979) the cubic relation very well.
However, we note a clear deviation from the cubic fit for the data out
of the shaded areas, corresponding to cavities with N W > 160 and Q
> ∼2.5 × 104 . We attribute this deviation to the effect of power dissi-
pation by light scattering, which would inevitably be present in our
devices due to the material roughness and fabrication imperfections.
As mentioned earlier, power dissipation, P, plays an important role
in defining the Q factor, as seen by the 1/P dependence in Eq. (2).
Thus, since power dissipation in our devices is always an increasing
function of the cavity length, it is expected that the dependence of
Q on the cavity length deviates from the cubic relationship for long
cavities.
FIG. 5. (a) Comparison of the fitted curve (blue) and the measured Q factors (red
dots) for TE polarization, with NM = NT = 15. (b) Comparison of the fitted curve
(blue) and the measured Q factors (red dots) for TM polarization, with NM = NT
= 25. (c) Zoom-in of the shaded area in (a). The fitted curve is based on these 7
data points and has an SSE of 1 and an R-squared of 0.9972. The Q values have
been scaled down by a factor of 1000 for a better fitting. (d) Zoom-in of the shaded
area in (b). The fitted curve is based on these 10 data points and has an SSE of
0.469 and an R-squared of 0.9979. The Q values have been scaled down by a
factor of 1000 for a better fitting.
IV. DISCUSSION
The highest measured Q factor in the proposed cavity is
4.42 × 105 , which was obtained for N W = 200, N T = 80, and
N M = 60, and the total cavity length of 247.2 μm. A Q factor as high
as 1.29 × 105 was also measured for a smaller number of holes in
the mirror and taper sections (N W = 200, N T = 15, and N M = 15
and the total length of 133.9 μm), as shown in Fig. 5(a). To the best
our knowledge, these are the highest reported Q factors obtained
experimentally for non-suspended SiN nanobeam cavities.11–13 The
slow-light waveguide inside the proposed cavities affects the Q fac-
tor in two ways: (I) its group index defines the minimum achievable
Q factor for a zero-length cavity with a fixed number of holes in the
mirror and taper sections, and (II) its increased length can enhance
the Q factor significantly, considering that the Q factor has a cubic
dependence on L, as opposed to the linear dependence in conven-
tional cavities.25 It is also in contrast to the nanobeam cavities with
a conventional strip waveguide in between the mirrors in which the
maximum attainable Q factor is obtained for a zero-length cavity.6,31
Furthermore, our analysis indicates that the Purcell factor varies
quadratically with L, suggesting the possibility of enhancing this fig-
ure by increasing the cavity length. The maximum useful waveguide
length is limited due to the pronounced scattering loss in slow-light
waveguides32,33 which consequently reduces the maximum Q factor
in practice. The effect of the loss on the Q factor and the Purcell fac-
tor will be further studied and reported elsewhere. It is also worth
mentioning that the Q factors reported in this work are comparable
to those previously measured for suspended SiN nanobeam cavities

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TABLE II. Comparison of different SiN cavities.

Structure SiN thickness (nm) L (μm) λ (nm) Q factor References

Sa 200 ∼5.7 ∼630 5.5 × 104 15

S 400 ∼28.2 ∼1500 3.0 × 105 16
S 350 ∼21.6 ∼980 4.0 × 105 17
NSb 220 ∼18.5 ∼630 7.6 × 103 11
NS 330 ∼13.7 ∼780 7.0 × 103 12
NS 220 ∼23.3 ∼730 6.5 × 103 13
NS 300 ∼247.2 ∼1605 4.4 × 105 This work
NS 300 ∼133.9 ∼1605 1.3 × 105 This work
a
Suspended cavities.
b
Non-suspended cavities.

with larger index contrasts.15–17 A comparison of several reported AUTHOR’S CONTRIBUTIONS

SiN nanobeam cavities is summarized in Table II.
V. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we report the design and experimental character-
ization of high-Q non-suspended nanobeam cavities fabricated on a
300-nm-thick SiN platform. The structures consist of 1D slow-light
photonic crystal waveguides (ng ∼ 24) of various lengths bounded
by Bragg mirrors. We show that the Q factor of these slow-light
cavities exhibits a cubic dependence on the cavity length, which
enables them to achieve large Q factors with modest cavity lengths.
We report measured Q factors as large as 4.42 × 105 and numeri-
cally predicted values of up to 2.8 × 107 , which are comparable to
those of suspended SiN nanobeam cavities previously reported. In
addition, a TM polarization filter is designed and included to enable
the high-contrast detection (>50 dB) of the TE resonant modes,
which would otherwise be buried under the transmission of excess
TM polarization. The proposed cavities are mechanically robust and
have a great potential to be integrated with new photonic materials
such as 2D materials. Thus, these high-Q cavities are promising for
a wide variety of applications such as narrowband filtering, ultra-
low energy switching and modulation, sensing, and cavity quantum
electrodynamics.
VI. METHODS
The devices are fabricated in the following procedure. First,
300-nm-thick stoichiometric SiN is deposited via low-pressure
chemical vapor deposition (LPCVD) on silicon wafers with 10-μm
thermal SiO2 on top. Device patterning is performed by e-beam
lithography with a ZEP-520A resist, followed by a developing pro-
cess. Next, a thin chromium layer is deposited as the hard mask
and nanobeam cavity patterns are then transferred into SiN by a
CHF3 –SF6 based plasma etching process. The hard mask is removed
with an acid and 4-μm-thick SiO2 cladding is deposited via plasma-
enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD).
SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL
See the supplementary material for further details regarding the
TM polarization filter.
J.Z. and Z.J. contributed equally to this work. I.D.L and M.D.
supervised all aspects of the project.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We thank the University of Maryland Fablab staff member
Mark Lecates for assistance with the fabrication procedure. J. Zhan,
M. Dagenais, and S. Veilleux acknowledge the support from the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) through
Grant No. 16-APRA16-0064. J. Zhan, Z. Jafari, M. Dagenais, and I.
De Leon were supported by the UMD-TEC Seed Award, Grant No.
2-957016 (0020240I10). I. De Leon and Z. Jafari acknowledge the
financial support from CONACyT Grant No. CN-17-109 and from
the Federico Baur Endowed Chair in Nanotechnology.
DATA AVAILABILITY
The data that support the findings of this study are available
from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
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