Demonstration of a silicon Raman laser

Abstract

We report the demonstration of the first silicon Raman laser. Experimentally, pulsed Raman laser emission at 1675 nm with 25 MHz repetition rate is demonstrated using a silicon waveguide as the gain medium. The laser has a clear threshold at 9 W peak pump pulse power and a slope efficiency of 8.5%.

A continuous-wave Raman silicon laser

“…Rates of mineral dissolution can be enhanced by biological processes 3 . But plants also take up considerable quantities of silica from soil solution, which is recycled into the soil from falling litter in a separate soil-plant silica cycle that can be significant in comparison with weathering input and hydrologic output [4][5][6][7][8] . Here we analyse soil water in basaltic soils across the Hawaiian islands to assess the relative contributions of weathering and biogenic silica cycling by using the distinct signatures of the two processes in germanium/silicon ratios.…”

“…Recently, stimulated Raman scattering has been used to demonstrate light amplification and lasing in silicon [4][5][6][7][8][9] . However, because of the nonlinear optical loss associated with two-photon absorption (TPA)-induced free carrier absorption (FCA) [10][11][12] , until now lasing has been limited to pulsed operation 8,9 . Here we demonstrate a continuous-wave silicon Raman laser.…”

Silicon Multimode Photonic Integrated Devices for on-Chip Mode-Division-Multiplexed Optical Interconnects

“…This design rule usually works well especially for low index-contrast (∆) optical waveguides (e.g., SiO 2 -on-Si buried optical waveguides). However, it becomes very different for small optical waveguides with very high ∆, e.g., submicron SOI waveguides, which have been used widely for ultra-compact CMOS-compatible PICs [45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56]. For high-∆ optical waveguides, mode conversion between the eigenmodes may occur in an adiabatic tapered structure due to the mode hybridization at some special waveguide widths [57][58][59][60][61][62].…”

An optically pumped silicon evanescent laser

“…A major hurdle for silicon has traditionally been its light emission inefficiency due to its indirect bandgap. Efforts to overcome this hurdle have come in the form of a Raman Laser [1,2] and LEDs [3,4] that utilize material engineering to increase the light emission efficiency of silicon. Another approach has been the heterogeneous integration of Si with III-V semiconductors including heteroepitaxial growth [5] and wafer bonding.…”