Lu Xiyuan, Moille Gregory, Singh Anshuman, Li Qing, Westly Daron A, Rao Ashutosh, Yu Su-Peng, Briles Travis C, Papp Scott B, Srinivasan Kartik
Microsystems and Nanotechnology Division, Physical Measurement Laboratory, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD 20899, USA.
Maryland NanoCenter, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA.
Optica. 2019;6(12). doi: 10.1364/optica.6.001535.
The on-chip creation of coherent light at visible wavelengths is crucial to field-level deployment of spectroscopy and metrology systems. Although on-chip lasers have been implemented in specific cases, a general solution that is not restricted by limitations of specific gain media has not been reported. Here, we propose creating visible light from an infrared pump by widely-separated optical parametric oscillation (OPO) using silicon nanophotonics. The OPO creates signal and idler light in the 700 nm and 1300 nm bands, respectively, with a 900 nm pump. It operates at a threshold power of (0.9 ± 0.1) mW, over 50× smaller than other widely-separated microcavity OPO works, which have only been reported in the infrared. This low threshold enables direct pumping without need of an intermediate optical amplifier. We further show how the device design can be modified to generate 780 nm and 1500 nm light with a similar power efficiency. Our nanophotonic OPO shows distinct advantages in power efficiency, operation stability, and device scalability, and is a major advance towards flexible on-chip generation of coherent visible light.
在可见波长下片上产生相干光对于光谱学和计量学系统的现场级部署至关重要。尽管片上激光器已在特定情况下实现，但尚未报道一种不受特定增益介质限制的通用解决方案。在此，我们提出利用硅纳米光子学通过广泛分离的光学参量振荡（OPO）从红外泵浦产生可见光。该OPO分别利用900nm泵浦在700nm和1300nm波段产生信号光和闲频光。它在（0.9±0.1）mW的阈值功率下工作，比其他仅在红外波段报道的广泛分离的微腔OPO工作低50倍以上。这种低阈值使得无需中间光放大器即可直接泵浦。我们进一步展示了如何修改器件设计以产生具有相似功率效率的780nm和1500nm光。我们的纳米光子OPO在功率效率、运行稳定性和器件可扩展性方面显示出明显优势，是朝着灵活的片上产生相干可见光迈出的重要一步。
