Abstract
In recent years, the 2 µm waveband has been gaining significant attention due to its potential in the realization of several key technologies, specifically, future long-haul optical communications near the 1.9 µm wavelength region. In this work, we present a hybrid silicon photonic wavelength-tunable diode laser with an operating range of 1881-1947 nm (66 nm) for the first time, providing good compatibility with the hollow-core photonic bandgap fiber and thulium-doped fiber amplifier. Room-temperature continuous-wave operation was achieved with a favorable on-chip output power of 28 mW. Stable single-mode lasing was observed with side-mode suppression ratio up to 35 dB. Besides the abovementioned potential applications, the demonstrated wavelength region will find critical purpose in H2O spectroscopic sensing, optical logic, signal processing as well as enabling the strong optical Kerr effect on Si.
Highlights
Exuberant innovation in the telecommunications industry have led to the development of low-loss single-mode fiber (SMF) [1], erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs) [2], wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) techniques [3], and more recently, digital coherent transmission [4]; pushing the record transmission capacity within a factor of 2 of the nonlinear Shannon limit [5]
We designed our semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) to be based on In0.2Ga0.8Sb single quantum well (SQW), sandwiched by Al0.25GaAsSb barriers resulting in 1.26% of compressive strain
Characterization of the laser was carried out by placing the SOA and Silicon photonics (SiPh) chip on 2 different x/y/z precision manual alignment stages, each connected to a thermo-electric controller (TEC); near-field electric field distribution of the III - V waveguide and Si slab waveguide together with its respective sizes are indicated at the inset of Fig. 5(a)
Summary
Exuberant innovation in the telecommunications industry have led to the development of low-loss single-mode fiber (SMF) [1], erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs) [2], wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) techniques [3], and more recently, digital coherent transmission [4]; pushing the record transmission capacity within a factor of 2 of the nonlinear Shannon limit [5]. SiPh offers low propagation loss and high integration densities while III - V material contributes high gain values [37] and the flexibility for bandgap engineering via changes in material composition [38], realizing high performance, novel light sources; examples are the high power, sub-kHz linewidth heterogenous silicon laser [39] as well as hybrid/heterogenous silicon lasers that operate in the spectroscopically imperative wavelength region above 2 μm [40]. Impressive work on SHREC wavelength-tunable laser diodes have been achieved near the C-band [41,42,43,44,45,46]; examples include wide tuning range [42], increased power and operating temperature [44], large side-mode suppression ratio (SMSR) [45] and shifting of tuning range from C- to L-band [46]. The performance of the laser is experimentally characterized and discussed
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