Handshaking of light and sound: enabling on-chip silicon light source and optical amplifier

Silicon photonics has gained great interest because it allows optical devices to be made cheaply using standard semiconductor fabrication techniques and integrated with microelectronic chips. However, the lack of silicon light source and optical amplifier is a barrier to develop an efficient integrated silicon photonic device and limit its scalability. The recent advent of hybrid photonic-phononic waveguides has revealed Brillouin interactions to be one of the strongest and most tailorable nonlinearities in silicon. This Villum Experiment project is aiming at exploring, for the first time, hydrogenated amorphous silicon with deuterium passivation (a-Si:HD) as a material platform to design a silicon-based laser/amplifier by using the Brillouin effect. A silicon-based laser would make silicon photonic platform much more powerful and open up possibilities for sensors and actuators for cheap diagnostics, imaging and communication.