NSF Materials World Network: Creating Optoelectronic Materials and Devices Inside Microstructured Optical Fibers

光纤的发展直接导致了20世纪后期的数据通信革命，现在正在影响从遥感到生物医学的许多其他领域。这种影响越来越大，部分原因是有源器件的快速发展，光纤不仅可以作为无源波导，还可以作为直接调制、产生或以其他方式操纵光的介质。由于这种多功能性，纤维几乎在任何使用光的应用中都是系统的关键部件。在光子学取得这些突破的同时，计算机和微电子工业自20世纪60年代以来每18个月就会出现CPU和DRAM芯片上晶体管的性能价格比的指数级增长，光电子元件如DVD播放器中使用的可见激光器和用于在光纤中产生和调制光的红外激光二极管也有相应的改进。所有微电子学所基于的晶体半导体，即硅、锗、砷化镓等，几乎是每一位科学家和工程师所熟悉的。以超长、超细的玻璃丝为基础的光纤和以光刻技术制造的平面芯片为基础的微电子技术为代表的先进技术领域，通常通过使用中间光学和封装来集成创建通信网络系统。然而，我们正在开发的技术允许由硅和锗制成的晶体半导体结构直接在光纤内部。这项技术利用了一种类似于现代平面电子设备的沉积工艺，因此开辟了将光纤的导光能力与半导体操纵光和电子的特殊能力直接结合起来的可能性。这表明，目前由平面光电子学执行的许多功能现在可能直接集成在光纤本身中，并且许多不能在传统平面几何结构中实现的新半导体器件现在可能成为可能。先进的技术应用需要高性能的设备，这反过来又需要特殊的材料；我们的工作重点是基础材料的研究和开发，将这种创新从实验室转移到下一代光子器件和系统。

The development of optical fibres led directly to the data communications revolution of the late 20th century and are now impacting many other fields from remote sensing to biomedicine. This impact is growing in part because of rapid advances in active devices for which the fibre serves not merely as a passive waveguide, but as a medium to directly modulate, generate, or otherwise manipulate light. As a result of this versatility, fibres form key components of systems in almost any applications that use light. In parallel with these breakthroughs in photonics, the computer and microelectronics industries has seen exponential growth every 18 months since the 1960's of the performance to price ratio of transistors on CPU and DRAM chips, with commensurate improvements in optoelectronic components such as the visible lasers used in DVD players, and the infrared laser diodes used to generate and modulate light for data communications in optical fibres. The crystalline semiconductors upon which all microelectronics is based, namely silicon, germanium, gallium arsenide and many others, are familiar to almost every scientist and engineer. The advanced technological fields represented by fibre optics that are based on very long, very thin strands of glass and microelectronics based on planar chips fabricated by lithography, are typically integrated to create communication network systems by using intermediate optics and packaging. However, the technology we are developing allows crystalline semiconductor structures made from silicon and germanium directly inside the optical fibre itself. This technique utilises a deposition process similar to that used for modern planar electronic devices and so opens up the possibility for directly combining the light guiding capabilities of optical fibres with the exceptional capabilities of semiconductors for manipulating light and electrons. This suggests that many of the functions currently performed by planar optoelectronics might now be integrated directly inside the fibre itself, and that many new semiconductor devices that cannot be realised in a conventional planar geometry may now become possible. Advanced technological applications demand high performance devices, which in turn require exceptional materials; our efforts focus on the fundamental materials research and development necessary to move this innovation beyond the laboratory to next generation photonic devices and systems.