Near‐Infrared Dual‐Band Frequency Comb Generation from a Silicon Resonator

Abstract

Benefitting from the mature, cost‐effective, and scalable manufacturing capabilities of complementary metal‐oxide‐semiconductor (CMOS) technology, silicon photonics has facilitated the seamless and monolithic integration of diverse functionalities, including optical sources, modulators, and photodetectors. Microresonators can generate multiple coherent optical frequency comb lines and serve as optical sources. However, at the telecom band, silicon suffers from two‐photon absorption and free‐carrier absorption, which severely hampers the realization of microcombs from a single silicon chip at telecom wavelengths until now. In this paper, a novel approach is presented and demonstrated with near‐infrared dual‐band frequency combs from a multimode silicon resonator. With a single pumping configuration, dual‐band combs are generated from the interaction between the pump and Raman Stokes fields by involving two different optical mode families but with similar group velocities. It is observed that the pump power required to generate dual‐band combs is as low as 0.7 mW. The work in bringing telecom microcombs to the silicon platform will advance silicon photonics for the next generation of monolithically integrated technology based on a single silicon chip, enabling new possibilities for further exploring silicon photonics‐based applications in optical telecommunications, sensing, and quantum metrology in the telecom band using a monolithic single silicon chip.