1. Intel Corporation, 2200 Mission College Blvd, CHP3-109, Santa Clara, California 95054, USA
2. Intel Corporation, S.B.I. Park Har Hotzvim, Jerusalem, 91031, Israel

Correspondence to: Haisheng Rong¹ Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to H.R. (Email: haisheng.rong@intel.com).

Abstract

The possibility of light generation and/or amplification in silicon has attracted a great deal of attention¹ for silicon-based optoelectronic applications owing to the potential for forming inexpensive, monolithic integrated optical components. Because of its indirect bandgap, bulk silicon shows very inefficient band-to-band radiative electron–hole recombination. Light emission in silicon has thus focused on the use of silicon engineered materials such as nanocrystals^{2, 3, 4, 5}, Si/SiO₂ superlattices⁶, erbium-doped silicon-rich oxides^{7, 8, 9, 10}, surface-textured bulk silicon¹¹ and Si/SiGe quantum cascade structures¹². Stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) has recently been demonstrated as a mechanism to generate optical gain in planar silicon waveguide structures^{13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21}. In fact, net optical gain in the range 2–11 dB due to SRS has been reported in centimetre-sized silicon waveguides using pulsed pumping^{18, 19, 20, 21}. Recently, a lasing experiment involving silicon as the gain medium by way of SRS was reported, where the ring laser cavity was formed by an 8-m-long optical fibre²². Here we report the experimental demonstration of Raman lasing in a compact, all-silicon, waveguide cavity on a single silicon chip. This demonstration represents an important step towards producing practical continuous-wave optical amplifiers and lasers that could be integrated with other optoelectronic components onto CMOS-compatible silicon chips.

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