Semiconductor Nanolasers Based on Integration with Silver

职务名称：基于与银集成的半导体纳米激光器过去55年，人类的计算能力取得了前所未有的进步，实现了以前难以想象的应用。 这已经随着电子集成电路的出现而实现，其中电子元件一起构建在单个芯片上。 增加计算能力是通过尺寸“缩放”来实现的，即缩小每个计算元件的尺寸以在单个芯片上容纳更多的元件，从而能够在给定时间内执行更复杂的功能。 人类交换信息的能力正在经历类似的范式转变，这是由于最近光子集成电路的商业化，光子集成电路是电子集成电路的模拟，它对光而不是电编码信息。 携带这些信息的光可以通过光纤传输到很远的地方。 在这些光子集成电路中，产生和处理光的许多组件以与电子集成电路对应物相同的方式集成在一起;然而，组件的基本最小尺寸受到光的相当大的长度尺度的限制。 因此，可以在单个芯片上组合少得多的组件，因为每个光学组件的尺寸必然比它们的电对应物大得多，从而限制了光子集成电路的能力。 克服这一挑战的方法是采用晶体金属将光限制在比光波长小得多的尺寸内。 这将使更小的光学元件，因此，更强大的光子集成电路。 这里的重点将是建立非常小的激光器，这是在光子集成电路中产生光的组件。 这项工作将为两位博士提供前沿研究机会。学生，增加研究机会的本科生从历史上代表性不足的群体，并帮助从事无数的前K-12学生与纳米科学的令人兴奋的世界。根据目前的预测，亚波长光学元件将需要在未来10年继续摩尔定律的InP基光子电路的进展。 目前的努力，可以解决这一挑战主要集中在异质集成的晶体半导体与非晶/多晶金属，限制其性能和/或应用到光子集成电路的前景。 针对这一关键挑战的正交方法是采用III-V有源介质与外延银的单片集成，以大大减少困扰基于金属的纳米光子器件的广泛领域的光学损耗。 外延银生长的最新进展已经揭示，光学损耗可以大大降低，等离子体激元传播长度显著增强，从而能够解决这一基本限制。 虽然这项工作集中在解决高效亚波长纳米激光源的需求，但该方法广泛适用于光子集成电路中所需的其他有源和无源器件。 这种多方面的研究将耦合外延III-V/银异质结构的生长和器件制造，以（1）实现在室温下工作的高性能，电注入纳米激光器和（2）照明和量化新的方法来集成银和III-V有源结构，显着增强纳米级的光-物质相互作用。

Title: Semiconductor Nanolasers Based on Integration with Silver The past 55 years has witnessed unprecedented progress in humanity's ability to compute, enabling applications that were previously unimaginable. This has been achieved with the advent of the electronic integrated circuit, where electrical elements are built together on a single chip. Increasing computing power is accomplished through size "scaling", namely shrinking the size of each computing element to accommodate more elements on a single chip, enabling more complex functions to be performed in a given time. Humanity's ability to exchange information is undergoing a similar paradigm shift, due to the recent commercialization of the photonic integrated circuit, an analog of the electronic integrated circuit that encodes information on light, rather than electricity. The light carrying this information can then be transmitted over great distances using fiber optics. In these photonic integrated circuits, numerous components that produce and process light are integrated together in much the same way as their electronic integrated circuit counterparts; however, the fundamental minimum size of components is limited by the rather large length scale of light. As a result, many fewer components may be combined on a single chip because the size of each optical component is necessarily much larger than their electrical counterparts, limiting the capabilities of photonic integrated circuits. The approach here to surmount this challenge is to employ crystalline metals to confine light within components to much smaller dimensions than the wavelength of light. This would enable much smaller optical components and, hence, significantly more powerful photonic integrated circuits. The focus here will be on building extremely small lasers, which are the components that generate light in photonic integrated circuits. This work will provide cutting-edge research opportunities for two Ph.D. students, increase research opportunities for undergraduates from historically underrepresented groups, and help engage countless pre-K-12 students with the exciting world of nanoscience.Based upon current projections, subwavelength optical components will be required in the next ~10 years to continue the Moore's Law of InP-based photonic circuits progress. Current efforts that could address this challenge are focused mainly on heterogeneous integration of crystalline semiconductors with amorphous/polycrystalline metals, limiting their performance and/or the prospects for application to photonic integrated circuits. An orthogonal approach to this critical challenge is to employ monolithic integration of III-V active media with epitaxial silver to greatly reduce the optical losses that plague the broad field of metal-based nanophotonic devices. Recent progress in the growth of epitaxial silver has revealed that optical losses can be greatly reduced and plasmon propagation lengths significantly enhanced, enabling a solution to this fundamental limitation. While this effort concentrates on addressing the need for efficient subwavelength nanolaser sources, the approach is broadly applicable to the other active and passive devices required in photonic integrated circuits. This multifaceted investigation will couple the growth and device fabrication of epitaxial III-V/silver heterostructures to (1) realize high-performance, electrically-injected nanolasers that operate at room temperature and (2) illuminate and quantify novel methods to integrate silver and III-V active structures that dramatically enhance light-matter interactions at the nanoscale.