Slow-light-enhanced gain in active photonic crystal waveguides
Slow-light-enhanced gain in active photonic crystal waveguides
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DOI：
10.1038/ncomms6039
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发表时间：
2014-09-01
影响因子：
16.6
通讯作者：
Mork, Jesper
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Ek, Sara;Lunnemann, Per;Mork, Jesper
无源光子晶体已经显示出许多有趣的现象，包括在线缺陷波导中的慢光传播。通过在波导中加入有源材料，可以利用慢光来提高材料的有效增益，这将具有有趣的应用前景，例如使超紧凑光放大器集成到光子芯片中。本文通过实验研究了嵌入量子阱的光子晶体膜结构的增益。我们发现，与脊状波导结构相比，仅改变光子晶体的结构参数可以提高增益系数的最大值，同时可以控制增益峰值的光谱位置。实验结果与理论结果在定性上一致，并表明在紧凑型光子集成放大器中应该可以实现与最先进的半导体光放大器相似的增益值。
Passive photonic crystals have been shown to exhibit a multitude of interesting phenomena, including slow-light propagation in line-defect waveguides. It was suggested that by incorporating an active material in the waveguide, slow light could be used to enhance the effective gain of the material, which would have interesting application prospects, for example enabling ultra-compact optical amplifiers for integration in photonic chips. Here we experimentally investigate the gain of a photonic crystal membrane structure with embedded quantum wells. We find that by solely changing the photonic crystal structural parameters, the maximum value of the gain coefficient can be increased compared with a ridge waveguide structure and at the same time the spectral position of the peak gain be controlled. The experimental results are in qualitative agreement with theory and show that gain values similar to those realized in state-of-the-art semiconductor optical amplifiers should be attainable in compact photonic integrated amplifiers.