Two-dimensional (2-D) materials are of tremendous interest to silicon photonics given their singular optical characteristics spanning light emission, modulation, saturable absorption, and nonlinear optics. To harness their optical properties, these atomically thin materials are usually attached onto prefabricated devices via a transfer process. Here we present a new route for 2-D material integration with silicon photonics. Central to this approach is the use of chalcogenide glass, a multifunctional material which can be directly deposited and patterned on a wide variety of 2-D materials and can simultaneously function as the light guiding medium, a gate dielectric, and a passivation layer for 2-D materials. Besides achieving improved fabrication yield and throughput compared to the traditional transfer process, our technique also enables unconventional multilayer device geometries optimally designed for enhancing light-matter interactions in the 2-D layers. Capitalizing on this facile integration method, we demonstrate a series of high-performance glass-on-graphene devices including ultra-broadband on-chip polarizers, energy-efficient thermo-optic switches, as well as mid-infrared (mid-IR) waveguide-integrated photodetectors and modulators based on graphene and black phosphorus.
Ultrafast electrically driven light emitter is a critical component in the development of the high bandwidth free-space and on-chip optical communications. Traditional semiconductor based light sources for integration to photonic platform have therefore been heavily studied over the past decades. However, there are still challenges such as absence of monolithic on-chip light sources with high bandwidth density, large-scale integration, low-cost, small foot print, and complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology compatibility. Here, we demonstrate the first electrically driven ultrafast graphene light emitter that operate up to 10 GHz bandwidth and broadband range (400 ~ 1600 nm), which are possible due to the strong coupling of charge carriers in graphene and surface optical phonons in hBN allow the ultrafast energy and heat transfer. In addition, incorporation of atomically thin hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) encapsulation layers enable the stable and practical high performance even under the ambient condition. Therefore, electrically driven ultrafast graphene light emitters paves the way towards the realization of ultrahigh bandwidth density photonic integrated circuits and efficient optical communications networks.
There has been a rapidly growing interest in graphene-based optoelectronics. This exceptional material exhibits broadband optical response, ultrahigh carrier mobility and more importantly, potential compatibility with silicon complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology. Here we present our recent works that integrate graphene with silicon channel waveguides and photonic crystal cavities. By coupling graphene to an optical cavity, we demonstrated an efficient electro-optic modulator that features a modulation depth of 10 dB and a switching energy of 300 fJ. Several high-speed modulators are also tested, showing a speed up to 0.57 GHz. In addition, we implemented a graphene photodetector on a silicon waveguide. The 53-μm-long graphene channel couples to the evanescent field of the waveguide mode, resulting in more than 60% absorption of the input light. We demonstrated a responsivity of 0.108 A/W in our photodetector. A data transmission of 12 Gbps and response time in excess of 20 GHz are also achieved. These results show the feasibility of graphene as a building block for silicon photonic integrated circuits. In particular, on-chip graphene active devices such as modulators and photodetectors are promising for their broadband response, high-speed operation, low power consumption and ease-to-fabrication.
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