Direct-bandgap light-emitting germanium in tensilely strained nanomembranes.

Silicon, germanium, and related alloys, which provide the leading materials platform of electronics, are extremely inefficient light emitters because of the indirect nature of their fundamental energy bandgap. This basic materials property has so far hindered the development of group-IV photonic active devices, including diode lasers, thereby significantly limiting our ability to integrate electronic and photonic functionalities at the chip level. Here we show that Ge nanomembranes (i.e., single-crystal sheets no more than a few tens of nanometers thick) can be used to overcome this materials limitation. Theoretical studies have predicted that tensile strain in Ge lowers the direct energy bandgap relative to the indirect one. We demonstrate that mechanically stressed nanomembranes allow for the introduction of sufficient biaxial tensile strain to transform Ge into a direct-bandgap material with strongly enhanced light-emission efficiency, capable of supporting population inversion as required for providing optical gain.

Strain engineered SiGe multiple-quantum-well nanomembranes for far-infrared intersubband device applications.

SiGe/Si quantum wells are of great interest for the development of Group-IV THz quantum cascade lasers. The main advantage of Group-IV over III-V materials such as GaAs is that, in the former, polar phonon scattering, which significantly diminishes the efficiency of intersubband light emission, is absent. However, for SiGe/Si multiple-quantum-well structures grown on bulk Si, the lattice mismatch between Si and Ge limits the critical thickness for dislocation formation and thus the number of periods that can be grown. Similarly, the use of composition-graded SiGe films as a lattice-matched substrate leads to the transfer of dislocations from the graded buffer substrate into the quantum wells, with a consequent decrease in light emission efficiency. Here we instead employ nanomembrane strain engineering to fabricate dislocation-free strain relaxed substrates, with lattice constants that match the average lattice constants of the quantum wells. This procedure allows for the growth of many periods with excellent structural properties. The samples in this work were grown by low-pressure chemical vapor deposition and characterized via high-resolution X-ray diffraction and far-infrared transmission spectroscopy, showing narrow intersubband absorption features indicative of high crystalline quality.

Single-layer-coated beam splitters for the division-of-amplitude photopolarimeter.

A design procedure is presented for a near-optimal, single-layer-coated prism beam splitter that serves as the key optical element of the division-of-amplitude photopolarimeter (DOAP). For given film and substrate refractive indices, the angle of incidence and film thickness are selected such that the ellipsometric differential phase shifts in reflection and transmission deltar, and deltat, differ by +/- pi/2, and the normalized determinant of the instrument matrix is maximized. The best results are obtained by using high-index films on low-index substrates. This is illustrated by examples of ZnS and GaP films on silica prisms in the visible and Si, Ge, and PbTe films on Irtran 1 substrates in the infrared. A 16 degrees Si-prism DOAP beam splitter at the 1.55-microm lightwave-communications wavelength is also presented. It uses a 163-nm SiO2 coating on the entrance face to satisfy the optimum delta condition at 73 degrees incidence, and the determinant of the instrument matrix is 78.23% of its theoretical maximum. The exit face of the Si prism is antireflection coated with a 208-nm Si3N4 film.