Physics and applications of quantum dot lasers for silicon photonics

Photonic integrated circuits (PICs) have enabled numerous high performance, energy efficient, and compact technologies for optical communications, sensing, and metrology. One of the biggest challenges in scaling PICs comes from the parasitic reflections that feed light back into the laser source. Th...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nanophotonics (Berlin, Germany) Germany), 2020-06, Vol.9 (6), p.1271-1286
Main Authors: Grillot, Frédéric, Norman, Justin C., Duan, Jianan, Zhang, Zeyu, Dong, Bozhang, Huang, Heming, Chow, Weng W., Bowers, John E.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Damping
Destabilization
Dot gain
dynamical instabilities
Engineering Sciences
Integrated circuits
Isolators
Lasers
Material properties
MATERIALS SCIENCE
nanostructures
Optical communication
Optimization
Photonics
Quantum dot lasers
Quantum dots
Quantum well lasers
semiconductor lasers
Silicon
silicon photonics
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Summary:Photonic integrated circuits (PICs) have enabled numerous high performance, energy efficient, and compact technologies for optical communications, sensing, and metrology. One of the biggest challenges in scaling PICs comes from the parasitic reflections that feed light back into the laser source. These reflections increase noise and may cause laser destabilization. To avoid parasitic reflections, expensive and bulky optical isolators have been placed between the laser and the rest of the PIC leading to large increases in device footprint for on-chip integration schemes and significant increases in packaging complexity and cost for lasers co-packaged with passive PICs. This review article reports new findings on epitaxial quantum dot lasers on silicon and studies both theoretically and experimentally the connection between the material properties and the ultra-low reflection sensitivity that is achieved. Our results show that such quantum dot lasers on silicon exhibit much lower linewidth enhancement factors than any quantum well lasers. Together with the large damping factor, we show that the quantum dot gain medium is fundamentally dependent on dot uniformity, but through careful optimization, even epitaxial lasers on silicon can operate without an optical isolator, which is of paramount importance for the future high-speed silicon photonic systems.
ISSN:2192-8606
2192-8614
2192-8614
DOI:10.1515/nanoph-2019-0570