近日，瑞士洛桑联邦理工学院的Tobias J. Kippenberg&Yang Liu及其研究团队取得一项新进展。经过不懈努力，他们研制出全混合集成铒基激光器。相关研究成果已于2024年6月10日在国际知名学术期刊《自然—光子学》上发表。
该研究团队展示了一个完全集成的铒激光器，实现了50Hz的固有线宽，高达17mW的高输出功率，低强度噪声和III-V泵浦激光器的集成，接近光纤激光器和最先进的半导体扩展腔激光器的性能。该激光电路基于铒离子注入的超低损耗氮化硅光子集成电路，具有腔内微晶化的微调滤波器，可在光学C和L波段内实现>40nm的波长可调性，并实现70dB的旁模抑制比。
这种新型的低噪声、可调谐集成激光器可以应用于激光雷达、微波光子学、光频率合成和自由空间通信，并且可以使用不同的稀土离子种类来扩展波长。
据悉，掺铒光纤激光器具有高相干性和低噪声，可用于光纤传感、陀螺仪、激光雷达和光学频率测量。在光子集成电路中赋予铒基增益可以为，将低噪声光纤激光器小型化到芯片级尺寸并实现大规模应用提供基础。尽管基于硅光子学和III-V增益介质的集成激光器取得了重大进展，但实现低噪声集成铒基激光器仍然是不可实现的。基于光子集成电路的高功率掺铒放大器的最新进展，使一类新型稀土离子激光器成为可能。
附：英文原文
Title: A fully hybrid integrated erbium-based laser
Author: Liu, Yang, Qiu, Zheru, Ji, Xinru, Bancora, Andrea, Lihachev, Grigory, Riemensberger, Johann, Wang, Rui Ning, Voloshin, Andrey, Kippenberg, Tobias J.
Issue&Volume: 2024-06-10
Abstract: Erbium-doped fibre lasers exhibit high coherence and low noise as required for fibre-optic sensing, gyroscopes, LiDAR and optical frequency metrology. Endowing erbium-based gain in photonic integrated circuits can provide a basis for miniaturizing low-noise fibre lasers to the chip-scale form factor and enable large-volume applications. Although major progress has been made on integrated lasers based on silicon photonics with III–V gain media, realizing low-noise integrated erbium-based lasers has, however, remained unachievable. Recent advances in photonic-integrated-circuit-based high-power erbium-doped amplifiers make a new class of rare-earth-ion-based lasers possible. Here we demonstrate a fully integrated erbium laser that achieves 50Hz intrinsic linewidth, high output power up to 17mW, low intensity noise and integration of a III–V pump laser, approaching the performance of fibre lasers and state-of-the-art semiconductor extended-cavity lasers. The laser circuit is based on an erbium-ion-implanted ultralow-loss silicon nitride photonic integrated circuit, with an intracavity microring-based Vernier filter that enables >40nm wavelength tunability within the optical C and L bands and attains a 70dB side-mode suppression ratio. This new class of low-noise, tunable integrated laser could find applications in LiDAR, microwave photonics, optical frequency synthesis and free-space communications, with wavelength extendibility using different rare-earth ion species.
DOI: 10.1038/s41566-024-01454-7
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41566-024-01454-7