Bridging the mid-infrared-to-telecom gap with silicon nanophotonic spectral translation

By Xiaoping Liu, Bart Kuyken, Gunther Roelkens, R. Baets, Richard M. Osgood, William M. J. Green. Nature Photonics, 2012

158 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Extending beyond traditional telecom-band applications to optical interconnects1, the silicon nanophotonic integrated circuit platform also has notable advantages for use in high-performance mid-infrared optical systems operating in the 2–8 µm spectral range2,3. Such systems could find applications in industrial and environmental monitoring4, threat detection5, medical diagnostics6 and free-space communication7. Nevertheless, the advancement of chip-scale systems is impeded by the narrow-bandgap semiconductors traditionally used to detect mid-infrared photons. The cryogenic or multistage thermo-electric cooling required to suppress dark-current noise8, which is exponentially dependent on Eg/kT, can restrict the development of compact, low-power integrated mid-infrared systems. However, if the mid-infrared signals were spectrally translated to shorter wavelengths, wide-bandgap photodetectors could be used to eliminate prohibitive cooling requirements. Furthermore, such detectors typically have larger detectivity and bandwidth than their mid-infrared counterparts8. Here, we use efficient four-wave mixing in silicon nanophotonic wires9,10,11,12 to facilitate spectral translation of a signal at 2,440 nm to the telecom band at 1,620 nm, across a span of 62 THz. Furthermore, a simultaneous parametric translation gain of 19 dB can significantly boost sensitivity to weak mid-infrared signals. Efficient four-wave-mixing process in silicon nanophotonic wires facilitates spectral translation of a signal at 2,440 nm to the telecommunications band at 1,620 nm across a span of 62 THz. This approach helps eliminate cooling requirements for the narrow-bandgap semiconductors traditionally used to detect mid-infrared photons.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0262e188f6b12a6f5277b0da322c1cea43dd6d4d

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

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Citations in the corpus

Silicon Photonic Integration Platform—Have We Found the Sweet Spot? (2014, methodology): “To date, for the 2–4 μm wavelength range, different SOI thicknesses have been used: from 220 nm in [74] for wavelengths around 2.”
Mid-infrared integrated photonics on silicon: a perspective (2017, methodology): “62 μm) was experimentally validated in SOI waveguides [202].”