Broadband Tunable Infrared Light Emission from Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Tunnel Junctions in Silicon Photonics.

Broadband near-infrared light emitting tunnel junctions are demonstrated with efficient coupling to a silicon photonic waveguide. The metal oxide semiconductor devices show long hybrid photonic-plasmonic mode propagation lengths of approximately 10 μm and thus can be integrated into an overcoupled resonant cavity with quality factor ≈ 49, allowing for tens of picowatt near-infrared light emission coupled directly into a waveguide. The electron inelastic tunneling transition rate and the cavity mode density are modeled, and the transverse magnetic (TM) hybrid mode excitation rate is derived.

C- and O-Band Dual-Polarization Fiber-to-Chip Grating Couplers for Silicon Nitride Photonics.

Highly efficient coupling of light from an optical fiber to silicon nitride (SiN) photonic integrated circuits (PICs) is experimentally demonstrated with simple and fabrication-tolerant grating couplers (GC). Fully etched amorphous silicon gratings are formed on top of foundry-produced SiN PICs in a back-end-of-the-line (BEOL) process, which is compatible with 248 nm deep UV lithography. Metallic back reflectors are introduced to enhance the coupling efficiency (CE) from -1.

Broadband Metallic Fiber-to-Chip Couplers and a Low-Complexity Integrated Plasmonic Platform.

We present a plasmonic platform featuring efficient, broadband metallic fiber-to-chip couplers that directly interface plasmonic slot waveguides, such as compact and high-speed electro-optic modulators. The metallic gratings exhibit an experimental fiber-to-slot coupling efficiency of -2.7 dB with -1.

Plasmonic IQ modulators with attojoule per bit electrical energy consumption.

Coherent optical communications provides the largest data transmission capacity with the highest spectral efficiency and therefore has a remarkable potential to satisfy today's ever-growing bandwidth demands. It relies on so-called in-phase/quadrature (IQ) electro-optic modulators that encode information on both the amplitude and the phase of light. Ideally, such IQ modulators should offer energy-efficient operation and a most compact footprint, which would allow high-density integration and high spatial parallelism.

Large Pockels effect in micro- and nanostructured barium titanate integrated on silicon.

The electro-optical Pockels effect is an essential nonlinear effect used in many applications. The ultrafast modulation of the refractive index is, for example, crucial to optical modulators in photonic circuits. Silicon has emerged as a platform for integrating such compact circuits, but a strong Pockels effect is not available on silicon platforms.