High-performance lasers for fully integrated silicon nitride photonics

TL;DR

This paper presents high-performance, fully integrated silicon nitride lasers with low linewidth and high output power, advancing the development of low-noise, chip-scale photonic systems for telecommunications and sensing.

Contribution

It introduces a novel integration technique yielding high-power, low-linewidth lasers on SiN, overcoming previous fabrication and mode transition challenges.

Findings

Lasers with tens of milliwatts output power achieved.

Sub-kHz fundamental linewidth demonstrated.

Potential for Hertz-level linewidth lasers shown.

Abstract

Silicon nitride (SiN) waveguides with ultra-low optical loss enable integrated photonic applications including low noise, narrow linewidth lasers, chip-scale nonlinear photonics, and microwave photonics. Lasers are key components to SiN photonic integrated circuits (PICs), but are difficult to fully integrate with low-index SiN waveguides due to their large mismatch with the high-index III-V gain materials. The recent demonstration of multilayer heterogeneous integration provides a practical solution and enabled the first-generation of lasers fully integrated with SiN waveguides. However a laser with high device yield and high output power at telecommunication wavelengths, where photonics applications are clustered, is still missing, hindered by large mode transition loss, nonoptimized cavity design, and a complicated fabrication process. Here, we report high-performance lasers on SiN with tens of milliwatts output through the SiN waveguide and sub-kHz fundamental linewidth, addressing all of the aforementioned issues. We also show Hertz-level linewidth lasers are achievable with the developed integration techniques. These lasers, together with high-$Q$ SiN resonators, mark a milestone towards a fully-integrated low-noise silicon nitride photonics platform. This laser should find potential applications in LIDAR, microwave photonics and coherent optical communications.