High Gain Submicrometer Optical Amplifier at Near-Infrared Communication Band

Nanoscale near-infrared optical amplification is important but remains a challenge to achieve. Here we report a unique design of silicon and erbium silicate core-shell nanowires for high gain submicrometer optical amplification in the near-infrared communication band. The high refraction index silicon core is used to tightly confine the optical field within the submicron structures, and the single crystalline erbium-ytterbium silicates shell is used as the highly efficient gain medium. Both theoretical and experimental results show that, by systematically tuning the core diameter and shell thickness, a large portion of the optical power can be selectively confined to the erbium silicate shell gain medium to enable a low loss waveguide and high gain optical amplifier. Experimental results further demonstrate that an optimized core-shell nanowire can exhibit an excellent net gain up to 31  dB mm(-1), which is more than 20 times larger than the previously reported best results on the micron-scale optical amplifiers.