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Extreme electronic bandgap modification in laser-crystallized silicon optical fibres

Nature Materials volume 13, pages 1122–1127 (2014)Cite this article

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Abstract

For decades now, silicon has been the workhorse of the microelectronics revolution and a key enabler of the information age. Owing to its excellent optical properties in the near- and mid-infrared, silicon is now promising to have a similar impact on photonics. The ability to incorporate both optical and electronic functionality in a single material offers the tantalizing prospect of amplifying, modulating and detecting light within a monolithic platform. However, a direct consequence of silicon’s transparency is that it cannot be used to detect light at telecommunications wavelengths. Here, we report on a laser processing technique developed for our silicon fibre technology through which we can modify the electronic band structure of the semiconductor material as it is crystallized. The unique fibre geometry in which the silicon core is confined within a silica cladding allows large anisotropic stresses to be set into the crystalline material so that the size of the bandgap can be engineered. We demonstrate extreme bandgap reductions from 1.11 eV down to 0.59 eV, enabling optical detection out to 2,100 nm.

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Figure 1: Fabrication of an a-Si optical fibre.
Figure 2: Simulations of the thermodynamics and kinetics of a laser-irradiated silicon optical fibre.
Figure 3: Material analysis of laser-crystallized Si optical fibres.
Figure 4: Crystallographic study of laser-crystallized Si optical fibres.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge Diamond Light Source for time on Beamline I18 under proposal SP8211-1 and K. Ignatyev for technical assistance. We would also like to thank S. Boden for taking the helium ion microscope image, D. Tanner and S. Lei for valuable comments, S. Chaudhuri for help with the TEM work, and R. Soref for careful review and helpful discussions regarding the manuscript’s content. The authors acknowledge EPSRC (EP/J004863/1 & EP/I035307/1), NSF (DMR-1107894; primary US support) and the Penn State Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (NSF DMR-0820404) for financial support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Optoelectronics Research Centre, University of Southampton, Highfield, Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK

    Noel Healy, Sakellaris Mailis, Pier J. A. Sazio & Anna C. Peacock

  2. Institute of Thermophysics, SB RAS, Novosibirsk 630090, Russia

    Nadezhda M. Bulgakova

  3. HiLASE, Institute of Physics ASCR, 18221 Prague, Czech Republic

    Nadezhda M. Bulgakova

  4. Department of Chemistry and Materials Research Institute, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802, USA

    Todd D. Day, Justin R. Sparks, Hiu Y. Cheng & John V. Badding

Authors
  1. Noel Healy
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  2. Sakellaris Mailis
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  7. Hiu Y. Cheng
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Contributions

N.H., S.M. and A.C.P. designed the research. N.H. carried out the experiments and analysed the data. P.J.A.S. and N.H. designed the electrical measurements. T.D.D., J.R.S., H.Y.C. and J.V.B. developed and fabricated the a-Si fibres. N.M.B. developed the laser heating simulations. N.H. and A.C.P. wrote the manuscript; all authors contributed to the scientific discussion and revised the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Noel Healy.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Healy, N., Mailis, S., Bulgakova, N. et al. Extreme electronic bandgap modification in laser-crystallized silicon optical fibres. Nature Mater 13, 1122–1127 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat4098

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