Abstract
Silicon lasers have long been a goal for semiconductor scientists, and a number of important breakthroughs in the past decade have focused attention on silicon as a photonic platform. Here we review the most recent progress in this field, including low-threshold silicon Raman lasers with racetrack ring resonator cavities, the first germanium-on-silicon lasers operating at room temperature, and hybrid silicon microring and microdisk lasers. The fundamentals of carrier transition physics in crystalline silicon are discussed briefly. The basics of several important approaches for creating lasers on silicon are explained, and the challenges and opportunities associated with these approaches are discussed.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank Scott Rodgers, Ron Esman, Mike Haney and Jag Shah of DARPA/MTO, the Kavli Foundation, Intel and Hewlett Packard for funding this research. Many others contributed to the hybrid silicon research described here, including Hanan Bar, Dan Blumenthal, Hsu-Hao Chang, Hui-Wen Chen, Alexander Fang, Hyundai Park, Martijn Heck, Richard Jones, Brian Koch, Mario Paniccia, Omri Raday and Matthew Sysak.
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Di Liang is now employed by Hewlett Packard investigating hybrid silicon photonic integrated circuits. John Bowers is also involved in developing hybrid silicon photonic integrated circuits at Aurrion.
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Liang, D., Bowers, J. Recent progress in lasers on silicon. Nature Photon 4, 511–517 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2010.167
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2010.167
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