E_r silicate nanowire light source for silicon photonics

In recent years, Er silicates and Yttrium (Y) and Ytterbium (Yb) co-doped Er silicates have attracted intensive investigations due to their efficient luminescence at 1.53μm. Compared with traditional Er-doped materials, the Er concentrations of silicates are about 1 to 2 orders of magnitude higher due to the stoichiometric nature of these Er compounds. However, it turned out that its large Er silicate waveguide transmission loss and high pumping power required inhibited the possibility of achieving high gain with device size scaled down. In order to solve the problems mentioned above, we use single crystal Er-Yb/Y silicate compound nanowires as the waveguide material to reduce the transmission loss due to fewer defects in single crystal nanowire. In addition, the quantum confinement effect existed in single crystal nanowire can improve the emission lifetime of the erbium, so that it will be much easier to achieve the erbium ion population inversion. In this talk, we will introduce our group recent work about Er/Yb/Y silicates nanowire waveguide materials. Firstly, we fabricated the Er silicate compound nanowire by a chemical vapor deposition method. The strong 1.53μm gain characteristics of ErxYb(Y)2-xSiO5 nanowire have been obtained. This property of Er silicate nanowires indicate that it is a promising material for achieving high gain nanowire optical waveguide amplifier and laser.