Germanium (Ge) has played a key role in silicon photonics as an enabling material for datacom applications. Indeed, the unique properties of Ge have been leveraged to develop high performance integrated photodectors, which are now mature devices. Ge is also very useful for the achievement of compact modulators and monolithically integrated laser sources on silicon. Interestingly, research efforts in these domains also put forward the current revolution of mid-IR photonics. Ge and Ge-based alloys also present strong advantages for mid-infrared photonic platform such as the extension of the transparency window for these materials, which can operate at wavelengths beyond 8 μm. Different platforms have been proposed to take benefit from the broad transparency of Ge up to 15 μm, and the main passive building blocks are now being developed. In this review, we will present the most relevant Ge-based platforms reported so far that have led to the demonstration of several passive and active building blocks for mid-IR photonics. Seminal works on mid-IR optical sensing using integrated platforms will also be reviewed.

Heavily-doped semiconductor films are very promising for application in mid-infrared plasmonic devices because the real part of their dielectric function is negative and broadly tunable in this wavelength range. In this work we investigate heavily n-type doped germanium epilayers grown on different substrates, in-situ doped in the 10 17 to 10 19 cm −3 range, by infrared spectroscopy, first principle calculations, pump-probe spectroscopy and dc transport measurements to determine the relation between plasma edge and carrier density and to quantify mid-infrared plasmon losses. We demonstrate that the unscreened plasma frequency can be tuned in the 400 -4800 cm −1 range and that the average electron scattering rate, dominated by scattering with optical phonons and charged impurities, increases almost linearly with frequency. We also found weak dependence of losses and tunability on the crystal defect density, on the inactivated dopant density and on the temperature down to 10 K. In films where the plasma was optically activated by pumping in the near-infrared, we found weak but significant dependence of relaxation times on the static doping level of the film. Our results suggest that plasmon decay times in the several-picosecond range can be obtained in ntype germanium thin films grown on silicon substrates hence allowing for underdamped mid-infrared plasma oscillations at room temperature.The recent push towards applications of spectroscopy for chemical and biological sensing in the mid-infrared (mid-IR)1-8 has prompted the need for conducting thin films displaying values of the complex dielectric functionǫ(ω) = ǫ ′ (ω) + iǫ ′′ (ω) that can be tailored to meet the needs of novel electromagnetic designs exploiting the concepts of metamaterials, transformation optics and plasmonics 9 . In the design of metamaterials, where subwavelength sized conducting elements are embedded in dielectric matrices, if the values of ǫ ′ of the metal and the dielectric are of the same order, but have opposite sign, the geometric filling fractions of the metal and dielectric can be readily tuned to achieve subwavelengthresolution focusing of radiation 10 . Such requirement is met by silver for wavelengths λ around 400 nm. The same condition cannot be achieved in the IR range by using elemental metals, however, because metals possess an extremely high negative value of ǫ ′ not equaled, in

Mid-infrared (mid-IR) silicon photonics is expected to lead key advances in different areas including spectroscopy, remote sensing, nonlinear optics or free-space communications, among others. Still, the inherent limitations of the silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology, namely the early mid-IR absorption of silicon oxide and silicon at λ~3.6 µm and at λ ~8.5 µm respectively, remain the main stumbling blocks that prevent this platform to fully exploit the mid-IR spectrum (λ ~2-20 µm). Here, we propose using a compact Ge-rich graded-index SiGe platform to overcome this constraint. A flat propagation loss characteristic as low as 2-3 dB/cm over a wavelength span from λ = 5.5 µm to 8.5 µm is demonstrated in Ge-rich SiGe waveguides of only 6 µm thick. The comparison of three different waveguides design with different vertical index profiles demonstrates the benefit of reducing the fraction of the guided mode that overlaps with the Si substrate to obtain such flat low loss behavior. Such Ge-rich SiGe platforms may open the route towards the implementation of mid-IR photonic integrated circuits with low-loss beyond the Si multi-phonon absorption band onset, hence truly exploiting the full Ge transparency window up to λ ~15 µm.

Spin qubits are considered to be among the most promising candidates for building a quantum processor 1 . Group IV hole spin qubits have moved into the focus of interest due to the ease of operation and compatibility with Si technology 2;3;4;5;6 . In addition, Ge offers the option for monolithic superconductor-semiconductor integration. Here we demonstrate a hole spin qubit operating at fields below 10 mT, the critical field of Al, by exploiting the large out-ofplane hole g-factors in planar Ge and by encoding the qubit into the singlet-triplet states of a double quantum dot 7;8 . We observe electrically controlled X and Z-rotations with tunable frequencies exceeding 100 MHz and dephasing times of 1 µs which we extend beyond 15 µs with echo techniques. These results show that Ge hole singlet triplet qubits outperform their electronic Si and GaAs based counterparts in speed and dephasing time, respectively. In addition, their rotation frequency and coherence time are on par with Ge single spin qubits, but they can be operated at much lower fields underlining their potential for on chip integration with superconducting technologies.

Ge on Si micro-disk, ring and racetrack cavities are fabricated and strained using silicon nitride stressor layers. Photoluminescence measurements demonstrate emission at wavelengths ≥ 2.3 μm, and the highest strained samples demonstrate in-plane, tensile strains of > 2 %, as measured by Raman spectroscopy. Strain analysis of the micro-disk structures demonstrate that shear strains are present in circular cavities, which can detrimentally effect the carrier concentration for direct band transitions. The advantages and disadvantages of each type of proposed cavity structure are discussed.