The integration of efficient, miniaturized group IV lasers into CMOS architecture holds the key to the realization of fully functional photonic-integrated circuits. Despite several years of progress, however, all group IV lasers reported to date exhibit impractically high thresholds owing to their unfavourable bandstructures. Highly strained germanium with its fundamentally altered bandstructure has emerged as a potential low-threshold gain medium, but there has yet to be a successful demonstration of lasing from this seemingly promising material system. Here we demonstrate a low-threshold, compact group IV laser that employs a germanium nanowire under a 1.6% uniaxial tensile strain as the gain medium. The amplified material gain in strained germanium can sufficiently overcome optical losses at 83 K, thus allowing the observation of multimode lasing with an optical pumping threshold density of ~3.0 kW cm−2. Our demonstration opens new possibilities for group IV lasers for photonic-integrated circuits.
展开▼
机译：将高效，小型化的IV组激光器集成到CMOS体系结构中，是实现功能齐全的光子集成电路的关键。尽管取得了几年的进展，但是，迄今为止报道的所有IV类激光由于其不利的能带结构都显示出不切实际的高阈值。高应变锗及其能带结构发生了根本改变，已成为一种潜在的低阈值增益介质，但尚未成功证明这种看似有希望的材料系统会产生激光。在这里，我们演示了一种低阈值的紧凑型IV组激光器，该激光器采用锗纳米线在1.6％单轴拉伸应变下作为增益介质。在应变锗中放大的材料增益可以充分克服在83 atK处的光损耗，因此可以观察到具有约3.0 kW cm -2 的光泵浦阈值密度的多模激光。我们的演示为光子集成电路的IV组激光器开辟了新的可能性。
展开▼
