Resonant structures based on amorphous silicon sub-oxide doped with Er3+ with silicon nanoclusters for an efficient emission at 1550 nm

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a resonant structure combining amorphous silicon sub-oxide doped with Er3+ and silicon nanoclusters, achieving approximately 12 times enhancement in 1550 nm emission efficiency through layered design and annealing techniques.

Contribution

It introduces a novel resonant structure integrating silicon nanoclusters with Er3+ doped amorphous silicon sub-oxide for improved infrared emission.

Findings

Approximately 12x increase in 1550 nm emission efficiency.

Resonant layers support multiple optical resonances near key wavelengths.

Enhanced optical pumping due to silicon nanocluster formation.

Abstract

We present a resonant approach to enhance 1550nm emission efficiency of amorphous silicon sub-oxide doped with Er3+ (a-SiOx<Er>) layers with silicon nanoclusters (Si-NC). Two distinct techniques were combined to provide a structure that allowed increasing approximately 12x the 1550nm emission. First, layers of SiO2 were obtained by conventional wet oxidation and a-SiOx<Er> matrix was deposited by reactive RF co-sputtering. Secondly, an extra pump channel (4I15/2 to 4I9/2) of Er3+ was created due to Si-NC formation on the same a-SiOx<Er> matrix via a hard annealing at 1150 C. The SiO2 and the a-SiOx<Er> thicknesses were designed to support resonances near the pumping wavelength (~500nm), near the Si-NC emission (~800nm) and near the a-SiOx<Er> emission (~1550nm) enhancing the optical pumping process.