Towards a CMOS-compatible telecom nanolaser platform on silicon

Compact chip-scale laser sources that can be directly integrated with silicon CMOS processes are a promising scalable alternative to heterogeneous integration of off-chip lasers, especially in forthcoming integrated photonics applications for photonic quantum information processing where thousands of sources on-chip would be beneficial. Here, we present our recent work toward developing chip-scale nanolasers that operate in the telecom C-band. We utilize rare earth-doped oxide films grown on silicon-on-insulator (SOI) as a gain medium. We fabricate silicon waveguides and 1D photonic crystal cavities to form arrays of devices and perform subsequent atomic layer deposition (ALD) that is compatible with CMOS processes. We have demonstrated amplified spontaneous emission using these cavities via linewidth narrowing and second-order photon correlation measurements. Finally, we will present our recent efforts to engineer fully coherent emission from these devices.