With the advent of the information age, the amount of information has exploded, and the use of traditional integrated circuits to process huge amounts of data has become increasingly difficult. Photon integrated circuits and photonic chips have the advantages of low power consumption, high speed and large bandwidth, and are a feasible solution for future optical information processing systems. Photonic chips generally include three main parts: on-chip light source, signal processing and signal detection. Accurate and controllable integration of micro/nano photonic devices with different materials, different structures and different functions on a single chip is one of the key laser pointer technologies for photonic chips.
Recently, Peking University’s “Extreme Optical Innovation Research Team” developed a high-precision dark-field optical imaging positioning technology (position uncertainty of only 21nm), and combined with electron beam engraving process to achieve on-chip quantum dot microdisk laser and silver. Accurate, parallel, and lossless integration of nanowire surface plasmon waveguides. The microdisk-silver nanowire composite structure has the advantages of a dielectric laser and a surface plasmon waveguide, and thus has not only a low threshold and a narrow linewidth characteristic of a dielectric laser, but also a deep subwavelength field of a surface plasmon waveguide. Binding characteristics. Based on this flexible and controllable preparation method, they achieve precise and controllable integration of various forms of on-chip microdisk lasers and surface plasmon waveguides, including tangential integration, radial integration, and complex integration, and for quantum dots. Without any processing damage; further, by simultaneously integrating multiple on-chip microdisk lasers with multiple silver nanowire surface plasmon waveguides, they obtained multi-mode, monochromatic single-mode and two-color single-mode deep sub-wavelengths (0.008λ2) Coherent output light source. These high performance deep sub-wavelength coherent output sources can be easily coupled and distributed to other deep sub-wavelength surface plasmon photonic devices and loops. Therefore, this flexible and controllable precise integration method has important applications in photonic-surface plasmon composite photonic circuits with high integration density, and this method can be extended to other materials and other functions of micro/nano photonic device integration. This provides a viable laser pointer solution for the implementation of future photonic chips.
The work was published on Advanced Materials (Advanced Materials 2018, 30, 1706546) in May 2018 and was highlighted in the form of a Frontispiece. The first author of the article is Rong Kexiu, a Ph.D. student at Peking University School of Physics, and Chen Jianjun, a researcher. The research work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Ministry of Science and Technology, the State Key Laboratory of Artificial Microstructures and Mesoscopic Physics, the Collaborative Innovation Center for Quantum Matter Science, and the Collaborative Innovation Center for Extreme Optics.