Beijing National Research Centre for Information Science and Technology (BNRist), Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China.
Integrated Photonics Laboratory, Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Systems, Graduate School of Engineering, the University of Tokyo, Tokyo, 113-8656, Japan.
Nat Commun. 2018 Jul 9;9(1):2652. doi: 10.1038/s41467-018-05170-z.
Semiconductor devices capable of generating a vortex beam with a specific orbital angular momentum (OAM) order are highly attractive for applications ranging from nanoparticle manipulation, imaging and microscopy to fiber and quantum communications. In this work, an electrically pumped integrated OAM emitter operating at telecom wavelengths is fabricated by monolithically integrating an optical vortex emitter with a distributed feedback laser on the same InGaAsP/InP epitaxial wafer. A single-step dry-etching process is adopted to complete the OAM emitter, equipped with specially designed top gratings. The vortex beam emitted by the integrated device is captured and its OAM mode purity characterized. The integrated OAM emitter eliminates the external laser required by silicon- or silicon-on-insulator-based OAM emitters, thus demonstrating great potential for applications in communication systems and the quantum domain.
能够产生具有特定轨道角动量（OAM）阶数的涡旋光束的半导体器件在从纳米粒子操纵、成像和显微镜到光纤和量子通信等应用中极具吸引力。在这项工作中，通过在同一 InGaAsP/InP 外延片上单片集成光学涡旋发射器和分布式反馈激光器，制作出了一种在电信波长下工作的电泵浦集成 OAM 发射器。采用单步干法刻蚀工艺完成 OAM 发射器的制作，同时配备了专门设计的顶部光栅。对集成器件发射的涡旋光束进行了捕获，并对其 OAM 模式纯度进行了表征。集成的 OAM 发射器消除了基于硅或绝缘体上硅的 OAM 发射器所需的外部激光，从而在通信系统和量子领域的应用中具有很大的潜力。
