Making silicon shine bright Silicon is the workhorse of the semiconductor electronics industry, but its lack of optical functionality is a barrier to developing a truly integrated silicon-based optoelectronics platform. Although there are several ways of exploiting nonlinear light-matter interactions to coax silicon into optical functionality, the effects tend to be weak. Otterstrom et al. used a suspended silicon waveguide racetrack structure to stimulate the stronger nonlinear effect of Brillouin scattering and achieve lasing from silicon. The ability to engineer the nonlinearity and tune the optical response through the design of the suspended cavity provides a powerful and flexible route for developing silicon-based optoelectronic circuits and devices. Science, this issue p. 1113 Brillouin scattering is exploited to develop a silicon laser. Brillouin laser oscillators offer powerful and flexible dynamics as the basis for mode-locked lasers, microwave oscillators, and optical gyroscopes in a variety of optical systems. However, Brillouin interactions are markedly weak in conventional silicon photonic waveguides, stifling progress toward silicon-based Brillouin lasers. The recent advent of hybrid photonic-phononic waveguides has revealed Brillouin interactions to be one of the strongest and most tailorable nonlinearities in silicon. In this study, we have harnessed these engineered nonlinearities to demonstrate Brillouin lasing in silicon. Moreover, we show that this silicon-based Brillouin laser enters a regime of dynamics in which optical self-oscillation produces phonon linewidth narrowing. Our results provide a platform to develop a range of applications for monolithic integration within silicon photonic circuits.

中文翻译：

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硅布里渊激光器

让硅发光 硅是半导体电子行业的主力军，但它缺乏光学功能是开发真正集成的基于硅的光电平台的障碍。尽管有多种方法可以利用非线性光-物质相互作用将硅引入光学功能，但效果往往较弱。奥特斯特罗姆等人。使用悬浮的硅波导跑道结构来激发更强的布里渊散射非线性效应并实现从硅发射激光。通过悬浮腔的设计来设计非线性和调整光学响应的​​能力为开发基于硅的光电电路和器件提供了强大而灵活的途径。科学，这个问题 p。1113布里渊散射被用来开发硅激光器。布里渊激光振荡器提供强大而灵活的动力学特性，作为各种光学系统中锁模激光器、微波振荡器和光学陀螺仪的基础。然而，传统硅光子波导中的布里渊相互作用明显较弱，阻碍了硅基布里渊激光器的发展。最近混合光子-声子波导的出现表明布里渊相互作用是硅中最强和最可定制的非线性之一。在这项研究中，我们利用这些工程非线性来演示硅中的布里渊激光。此外，我们表明这种基于硅的布里渊激光器进入了一个动力学状态，其中光学自振荡产生声子线宽变窄。