Electrical injection in slot waveguides

Nikola Prtljaga¹

¹Laboratorio di Nanoscienze, Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Trento, Via Sommarive 14, I-38050 Povo (Trento), Italy

In recent years, silicon photonics has managed to prove itself both as a mature technology and as well as a suitable platform for optoelectronic circuitry development. Despite of this recent “maturing” of the technology, silicon photonics remains to be one of the “hot topics” in research principally due to large investments by industries and governments. One of the still-ongoing unresolved issues remains the monolithical integration of an all silicon light source. Regardless of the number of different schemes proposed (III-V integration on Si, Ge on Si, Si-nc etc.) the final solution has not been found yet. One of the very promising and attractive paths to achieve the light amplification in silicon was based on Er3+ ions coupled to silicon nanoclusters. Originally, the use of silicon nanoclusters as broad band sensitizers for erbium sensitisation was proposed for the use in waveguide amplifiers configuration that targeted the replacement of EDFA (Erbium Doped Fiber Amplifiers) which dominate the telecommunication market. Nonetheless, one of the main drawbacks of the proposed approach was the use of silicon dioxide as a host matrix that prevent any kind of electrical pumping scheme that could have been employed. However, lately with the invention of the slot waveguides a new way has been opened towards the electrical injection in this kind of materials.