Broadband 2-µm emission on silicon chips: monolithically integrated Holmium lasers

Abstract

Laser sources in the mid-infrared are of great interest due to their wide applications in detection, sensing, communication and medicine. Silicon photonics is a promising technology which enables these laser devices to be fabricated in a standard CMOS foundry, with the advantages of reliability, compactness, low cost and large-scale production. In this paper, we demonstrate a holmium-doped distributed feedback laser monolithically integrated on a silicon photonics platform. The AlO:Ho glass is used as gain medium, which provides broadband emission around 2 µm. By varying the distributed feedback grating period and AlO:Ho gain layer thickness, we show single mode laser emission at wavelengths ranging from 2.02 to 2.10 µm. Using a 1950 nm pump, we measure a maximum output power of 15 mW, a slope efficiency of 2.3% and a side-mode suppression ratio in excess of 50 dB. The introduction of a scalable monolithic light source emitting at > 2 µm is a significant step for silicon photonic microsystems operating in this highly promising wavelength region.

Al2O3microring resonators for the detection of a cancer biomarker in undiluted urine

“…It has attractive features such as a low waveguide propagation loss down to 0.21 ± 0.05 dB/cm at a wavelength of 1550 nm [29] and a large transparency window ranging from the visible to the mid-infrared [30], exceeding that of SOI and making this material very interesting for the realization of optical sensors working in the visible, near and mid-infrared wavelength ranges. Furthermore, this material has the possibility of being doped with rare earth ions to achieve optical gain and active functionalities [31][32][33][34]. This feature allows for the development of laser-based biosensors to achieve narrower linewidths, higher sensitivities and novel sensing functionalities [35,36].…”

Potential for sub-mm long erbium-doped composite silicon waveguide DFB lasers

“…Finally, the mirror loss α m thus equals to Γ a × g. Figure 5a presents a synthesis of the obtained results in different conditions, as well as the corresponding values of |κ| and α m values when L is 500 μm, 250 μm and 100 μm, respectively. It is noteworthy that these dimensions are significantly shorter compared to the typical dimensions of the previously reported DFB lasers [16][17][18][19][20][21][22] .…”

“…In order to satisfy the two design requirements, we use the multi-segment waveguide structure proposed in Refs. [16][17][18][19][20][21][22] for silicon nitride waveguides but transpose and apply it to silicon waveguides while taking into account the substantial index contrast increment between the SiN and SOI waveguides.…”

Self-similar picosecond pulse compression for supercontinuum generation at mid-infrared wavelength in silicon strip waveguides

“…Recently, silicon-based mid-infrared nonlinear photonics has acquired a lot of attentions because of the advancement in light sources and passive components in the mid-infrared spectral region [1][2][3][4][5]. One of the crucial nonlinear phenomena is the supercontinuum (SC) generation in the mid-infrared region, which is crucial for applications such as molecular detection [6], nonlinear spectroscopy [7], optical frequency comb generation [8], etc.…”