Breakthroughs in Photonics 2012: Breakthroughs in Nanomembranes and Nanomembrane Lasers

Abstract

Crystalline semiconductor nanomembranes (NMs) offer unprecedented opportunities for unique electronic and photonic devices for vertically stacked high-density photonic/ electronic integration, high-performance flexible electronics, and adaptive flexible/conformal photonics. We present here major progresses reported over the last year, in the area of semiconductor NM photonics, with focuses on the innovative membrane laser devices and structures for silicon photonics and flexible optoelectronics.

Rapid Prototyping across the Spectrum: RF to Optical 3D Electromagnetic Structures

“…This material exhibited a high refractive index measured using terahertz time-domain spectroscopy with a peak value of 22.19 at ~ 0.5THz [119]. Other than media, nanomembranes have also been used to fabricate flexible optoelectronic components such as photodetectors and lasers [144]. This is critically important in the advancement of flexible electronics and integrated circuits.…”

Rapid laser nanomanufacturing and direct patterning of 2D materials on flexible substrates—2DFlex

“…New biomedicine and healthcare applications of flexible and stretchable devices have been emerged due to intrinsic mechanical properties, excellent compliance, biocompatibility, and conformability to tissue surfaces [2]. Also, flexible photonics is now enabling a wide range of emerging applications including board-level optical interconnects [3][4][5][6], optomechanical tuning [7][8][9], epidermal monitoring [10], strain sensing [11], and conformal photonics [12,13].…”

Transfer Printed Nanomembranes for Heterogeneously Integrated Membrane Photonics

“…Originally explored in the Bell Lab in 1990 [2], with the most successful commercialization in SOI (silicon on insulator), crystalline NMs have been experimentally transferred and stacked onto foreign substrates, including both rigid (e.g., silicon and glass) and flexible (e.g., plastics and polymers) substrates [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]. Over the past few years, a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) stamp transfer printing process, pioneered by Rogers et al [3,16], has been developed for the transfer of crystalline semiconductor NMs onto any substrates, for multi-layer stacking and integration onto silicon, glass, or polymer substrates [3,4,14,[17][18][19]. Based on this disruptive NM platform, a new class of photonic structures and devices has been demonstrated [3,4,8,12,14,[17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26].…”

“…Over the past few years, a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) stamp transfer printing process, pioneered by Rogers et al [3,16], has been developed for the transfer of crystalline semiconductor NMs onto any substrates, for multi-layer stacking and integration onto silicon, glass, or polymer substrates [3,4,14,[17][18][19]. Based on this disruptive NM platform, a new class of photonic structures and devices has been demonstrated [3,4,8,12,14,[17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26].…”