Large Brillouin amplification in silicon

By E. Kittlaus, Heedeuk Shin, Peter T. Rakich. Nature Photonics, 2015

265 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Net Brillouin amplification is demonstrated in silicon with just 5 mW pumping. Greater than 5 dB amplification is achieved. Both Kerr and Raman nonlinearities are radically enhanced by tight optical-mode confinement in nanoscale silicon waveguides1,2,3,4. Counterintuitively, Brillouin nonlinearities—originating from coupling between photons and acoustic phonons—are exceedingly weak in these same nonlinear waveguides5. Strong Brillouin interactions have only recently been realized in a new class of optomechanical structures that control the interaction between guided photons and phonons5,6,7. Despite these major advances, appreciable Brillouin-based optical amplification has yet to be observed in silicon. Using a membrane-suspended waveguide, we report large Brillouin amplification in silicon for the first time, reaching levels greater than 5 dB for modest pump powers, and demonstrate a record low (5 mW) threshold for net amplification. This work represents an important step towards the realization of high-performance Brillouin lasers and amplifiers in silicon.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5ce7eaaa5046667d9a31b87fbe05f552aaf6f25c

Citations in the corpus

• Compact Brillouin devices through hybrid integration on silicon (2017, unknown): “However, the reduced propagation losses enabled significantly higher net gain, up to 5 dB [27], than previous silicon demonstrations.”