Here, we use a novel growth scheme to overcome this roadblock and directly grow on-chip InGaAs nanopillar lasers, demonstrating the potency of bottom-up nano-optoelectronic integration. Unique helically-propagating cavity modes are employed to strongly confine light within subwavelength nanopillars despite low refractive index contrast between InGaAs and silicon. These modes thereby provide an avenue for engineering on-chip nanophotonic devices such as lasers. Nanopillar lasers are as-grown on silicon, offer tiny footprints and scalability, and are thereby particularly suited to high-density optoelectronics. They may ultimately form the basis of the missing monolithic light sources needed to bridge the existing gap between photonic and electronic circuits. 2Since the first laser demonstrated that stimulated emission processes in an optical medium can implement a powerful, coherent light source 1 , the field of photonics has witnessed an explosion of applications in telecommunications, lighting, displays, medicine, and optical physics amongst others. Integration of photonic and electronic devices to leverage the advantages of both has subsequently attracted great interest. In particular, integration of optical interconnects onto silicon (Si) chips has become critical as ongoing miniaturization of Si logic elements has incurred a bottleneck in inter-and intra-chip communications 2,3 . Efforts towards creating on-chip light sources for optical interconnects have included engineering silicon and germanium for optical gain 4-6 and stimulated Raman scattering 7-9 . Concurrently, III-V lasers have been heterogeneously bonded onto silicon substrates [10][11][12] . However, numerous challenges face these approaches. Wafer bonding have low yields because of a stringent surface flatness requirement down to the atomic scale, while group IV emitters must overcome an indirect band gap that offers exceedingly inefficient radiation. Monolithic growth of high-performance III-V lasers on silicon thereby remains a "holy grail" for cost-effective, massively scalable, and streamlined fabrication of on-chip light sources.The fundamental roadblock facing monolithic integration up to now has been a large mismatch of lattice constants and thermal expansion coefficients between III-V materials and The nanopillar-based laser is schematically depicted in Figure 1A. shows the hexagonal cross-section of the nanopillar, which results from its unique single crystal wurtzite structure 15 . As we will later show, the as-grown nanopillar structure provides a natural optical cavity supporting unique resonances that have not been observed before to the best of our knowledge. As such, nanopillars do not require additional top-down processing to form on-chip optical cavities. Instead, they provide a viable bottom-up approach towards integrating light sources and resonators onto a silicon chip.Importantly, nanopillars possess several critical advantages for optoelectronic integration onto silicon. They grow at a low temperature of 400 °C, which is dra...

Abstract-This paper presents an analysis of optical buffers based on slow-light optical delay lines. The focus of this paper is on slow-light delay lines in which the group velocity is reduced using linear processes, including electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT), population oscillations (POs), and microresonator-based photonic-crystal (PC) filters. We also consider slow-light delay lines in which the group velocity is reduced by an adiabatic process of bandwidth compression. A framework is developed for comparing these techniques and identifying fundamental physical limitations of linear slow-light technologies. It is shown that slow-light delay lines have limited capacity and delay-bandwidth product. In principle, the group velocity in slowlight delay lines can be made to approach zero. But very slow group velocity always comes at the cost of very low bandwidth or throughput. In many applications, miniaturization of the delay line is an important consideration. For all delay-line buffers, the minimum physical size of the buffer for a given number of buffered data bits is ultimately limited by the physical size of each stored bit. We show that in slow-light optical buffers, the minimum achievable size of 1 b is approximately equal to the wavelength of light in the buffer. We also compare the capabilities and limitations of a range of delay-line buffers, investigate the impact of waveguide losses on the buffer capacity, and look at the applicability of slow-light delay lines in a number of applications.Index Terms-Electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT), optical delay lines, optical memories, optical propagation in dispersive media, photonic crystals (PCs), slow light.

A theoretical study of differences in broadband high-indexcontrast grating (HCG) reflectors for TM and TE polarizations is presented, covering various grating parameters and properties of HCGs. It is shown that the HCG reflectors for TM polarization (TM HCG reflectors) have much thicker grating thicknesses and smaller grating periods than the TE HCG reflectors. This difference is found to originate from the different boundary conditions met for the electric field of each polarization. Due to this difference, the TM HCG reflectors have much shorter evanescent extension of HCG modes into low-refractive-index media surrounding the HCG. This enables to achieve a very short effective cavity length for VC-SELs, which is essential for ultrahigh speed VCSELs and MEMS-tunable VCSELs. The obtained understandings on polarization dependences will be able to serve as important design guidelines for various HCG-based devices.

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The authors report the experimental observation of a critical diameter (CD) of III-V compound semiconductor epitaxial nanowires (NWs) grown on lattice-mismatched substrates using Au-catalyzed vapor-liquid-solid growth. The CD is found to be inversely proportional to the lattice mismatch. NWs with well-aligned orientation are synthesized with catalysts smaller than the CD. Well-aligned InP NWs grown on a Si substrate exhibit a record low photoluminescence linewidth (5.1meV) and a large blueshift (173meV) from the InP band gap energy due to quantization. Well-aligned InAs NWs grown on a Si substrate are also demonstrated.