1. High-performance lasers for fully integrated silicon nitride photonics
- Author
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Heming Wang, Chao Xiang, Warren Jin, Boqiang Shen, Lin Chang, Jonathan D. Peters, Joel Guo, David Kinghorn, Lue Wu, Kerry J. Vahala, Qi-Fan Yang, Weiqiang Xie, Mario J. Paniccia, John E. Bowers, and Paul A. Morton
- Subjects
Materials science ,Science ,Silicon photonics ,Optical communication ,FOS: Physical sciences ,General Physics and Astronomy ,Physics::Optics ,Applied Physics (physics.app-ph) ,Article ,General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology ,law.invention ,Resonator ,Laser linewidth ,chemistry.chemical_compound ,law ,Physics::Atomic Physics ,Semiconductor lasers ,Multidisciplinary ,business.industry ,Photonic integrated circuit ,Physics - Applied Physics ,General Chemistry ,Laser ,Silicon nitride ,chemistry ,Optoelectronics ,Photonics ,business ,Waveguide ,Optics (physics.optics) ,Physics - Optics - Abstract
Silicon nitride (SiN) waveguides with ultra-low optical loss enable integrated photonic applications including low noise, narrow linewidth lasers, chip-scale nonlinear photonics, and microwave photonics. Lasers are key components to SiN photonic integrated circuits (PICs), but are difficult to fully integrate with low-index SiN waveguides due to their large mismatch with the high-index III-V gain materials. The recent demonstration of multilayer heterogeneous integration provides a practical solution and enabled the first-generation of lasers fully integrated with SiN waveguides. However, a laser with high device yield and high output power at telecommunication wavelengths, where photonics applications are clustered, is still missing, hindered by large mode transition loss, non-optimized cavity design, and a complicated fabrication process. Here, we report high-performance lasers on SiN with tens of milliwatts output power through the SiN waveguide and sub-kHz fundamental linewidth, addressing all the aforementioned issues. We also show Hertz-level fundamental linewidth lasers are achievable with the developed integration techniques. These lasers, together with high-Q SiN resonators, mark a milestone towards a fully integrated low-noise silicon nitride photonics platform. This laser should find potential applications in LIDAR, microwave photonics and coherent optical communications., Achieving high output power and low noise integrated lasers is a major challenge. Here the authors experimentally demonstrate integrated lasers from a Si/SiN heterogeneous platform that shows Hertz-level linewidth, paving the way toward fully integrating low-noise silicon nitride photonics in volume using real devices for lasing.
- Published
- 2021