Wang Tao, Zou Junlong, Puccioni Gian Piero, Zhao Wensheng, Lin Xiao, Chen Hongsheng, Wang Gaofeng, Lippi Gian Luca
Opt Express. 2021 Feb 15;29(4):5081-5097. doi: 10.1364/OE.416934.
Nanolasers are considered ideal candidates for communications and data processing at the chip-level thanks to their extremely reduced footprint, low thermal load and potentially outstanding modulation bandwidth, which in some cases has been numerically estimated to exceed hundreds of GHz. The few experimental implementations reported to date, however, have so-far fallen very short of such predictions, whether because of technical difficulties or of overoptimistic numerical results. We propose a methodology to study the physical characteristics which determine the system's robustness and apply it to a general model, using numerical simulations of large-signal modulation. Changing the DC pump values and modulation frequencies, we further investigate the influence of intrinsic noise, considering, in addition, the role of cavity losses. Our results confirm that significant modulation bandwidths can be achieved, at the expense of large pump values, while the often targeted low bias operation is strongly noise- and bandwidth-limited. This fundamental investigation suggests that technological efforts should be oriented towards enabling large pump rates in nanolasers, whose performance promises to surpass microdevices in the same range of photon flux and input energy.
由于其占地面积极小、热负载低以及潜在的出色调制带宽，纳米激光器被认为是芯片级通信和数据处理的理想候选者，在某些情况下，其调制带宽经数值估计已超过数百吉赫兹。然而，迄今为止报道的少数实验实现，无论是由于技术困难还是过于乐观的数值结果，都远远达不到这样的预测。我们提出一种方法来研究决定系统鲁棒性的物理特性，并将其应用于一个通用模型，使用大信号调制的数值模拟。通过改变直流泵浦值和调制频率，我们进一步研究固有噪声的影响，此外还考虑了腔损耗的作用。我们的结果证实，以大泵浦值为代价可以实现显著的调制带宽，而通常目标的低偏置操作受到强烈的噪声和带宽限制。这项基础研究表明，技术努力应朝着在纳米激光器中实现大泵浦速率的方向进行，其性能有望在相同的光子通量和输入能量范围内超越微型器件。
