April 2016
Spotlight Summary by Andrey N. Kuzmin
Optically pumped 1.3 μm room-temperature InAs quantum-dot micro-disk lasers directly grown on (001) silicon
This work is one of the exciting studies aimed at the integration of III-V semiconductor optical devices onto silicon, to fuse efficient photonic circuits with advanced silicon technology. The progress in high performance silicon-based photonic integration systems is being slowed down by the unavailability of monolithic silicon lasers. In this regard, direct integration of III-V materials onto silicon is of critical importance for the development an efficient on-chip light source. In this Optics Letters article, Wan et al. developed the technology of epitaxial growth of 1.3 μm InAs quantum dot (QD) micro-disk lasers on industrial-compatible silicon substrates, which allows to obtain a continuous-wave lasing at room temperature with thresholds as low as hundreds of microwatts, similarly to those for commercial laser diodes grown on a GaAs substrate. The combination of the epitaxial necking effect with a design of diamond-shaped silicon pockets resulted in the heteroepitaxial structure growth technique, which does not require the use of buffer and/or dislocation filter layers to prevent laser degradation. The proposed InAs QD laser diodes, monolithically grown on silicon, could be viewed as a very promising solution for on-chip lasers, one that satisfies the requirements for low threshold, cost-efficient, large-scale light sources for silicon photonic integration circuits.
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Article Information
Optically pumped 1.3 μm room-temperature InAs quantum-dot micro-disk lasers directly grown on (001) silicon
Yating Wan, Qiang Li, Alan Y. Liu, Arthur C. Gossard, John E. Bowers, Evelyn L. Hu, and Kei May Lau
Opt. Lett. 41(7) 1664-1667 (2016) View: Abstract | HTML | PDF