Design of High-Quality Reflectors for Vertical Nanowire Lasers on Si

TL;DR

This paper proposes a superlattice Bragg reflector to significantly enhance optical reflectivity at the NW/Si interface, enabling efficient vertically-standing nanowire lasers on silicon for advanced photonics.

Contribution

Introduction of a superlattice Bragg reflector design that increases reflectivity from ~10% to over 97%, addressing a key challenge in vertical NW laser integration on silicon.

Findings

Reflectivity improved to >97% with the superlattice reflector

Overcomes the optical leakage issue at the NW/Si interface

Facilitates low-threshold, high-quality NW lasers on Si

Abstract

Nanowires (NWs) with a unique one-dimensional structure can monolithically integrate high-quality III-V semiconductors onto Si platform, which is highly promising to build lasers for Si photonics. However, the lasing from vertically-standing NWs on silicon is much more difficult to achieve compared with NWs broken off from substrates, causing significant challenges in the integration. Here, the challenge of achieving vertically-standing NW lasers is systematically analyzed. The poor optical reflectivity at the NW/Si interface results severe optical field leakage to the substrate, and the commonly used SiO2 or Si2N3 dielectric mask at the interface can only improve it to ~10%, which is the major obstacle for achieving low-threshold lasing. A NW super lattice distributed Bragg reflector is therefore proposed, which is able to greatly improve the reflectivity to >97%. This study provides a highly-feasible method to greatly improve the performance of vertically-standing NW lasers, which can boost the rapid development of Si photonics.