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Silicon photonics in the near-Infra-Red, up to 1.6 um, is already one of key technologies in optical data communications, particularly short-range. It is also being prospected for applications in quantum computing, artificial intelligence, optical signal processing, where complex photonic integration is to be combined with large-volume fabrication. However, silicon photonics does not yet cover a large portion of applications in the mid-IR. In the 2 to 5 um wavelength range, environmental sensing, life sensing, and security all rely on optical signatures of molecular vibrations to identify complex individual chemical species. The markets for such analysis are huge and constantly growing, with a push for sensitivity, specificity, compactness, low-power operation and low cost. An all-group-IV, CMOS-compatible mid-IR integrated photonic platform would be a key enabler in this wavelength range. As for other wavelengths, such a platform should be complete with low-loss guided interconnects, detectors, modulators, eventually, and most importantly efficient and integrated light sources. This chapter reviews recent developments in the fields of mid-IR silicon-compatible optically and electrically pumped lasers, light emitting diodes and photodetectors based on Ge, GeSn and SiGeSn alloys. It contains insights into the fundamentals of these developments, including band structure modelling, material growth and processing techniques., Comment: Silicon Photonics IV: Innovative Frontiers, edited by David J. Lockwood and Lorenzo Pavesi, Springer series Topics in Applied Physics (2021)

GeSn alloys are the most promising semiconductors for light emitters entirely based on group IV elements. Alloys containing more than 8 at.% Sn have fundamental direct band-gaps, similar to conventional III-V semiconductors and thus can be employed for light emitting devices. Here, we report on GeSn microdisk lasers encapsulated with a SiNx stressor layer to produce tensile strain. A 300nm GeSn layer with 5.4 at.% Sn, which is an indirect band-gap semiconductor as-grown with a compressive strain of -0.32 %, is transformed via tensile strain engineering into a truly direct band-gap semiconductor. In this approach the low Sn concentration enables improved defect engineering and the tensile strain delivers a low density of states at the valence band edge, which is the light hole band. Continuous wave (cw) as well as pulsed lasing are observed at very low optical pump powers. Lasers with emission wavelength of 2.5 um have thresholds as low as 0.8kWcm^-2 for ns-pulsed excitation, and 1.1kWcm^-2 under cw excitation. These thresholds are more than two orders of magnitude lower than those previously reported for bulk GeSn lasers, approaching these values obtained for III-V lasers on Si. The present results demonstrate the feasabiliy and are the guideline for monolithically integrated Si-based laser sources on Si photonics platform.

We report the observation of the quantum-confined Stark effect in Ge/SiGe multiple quantum well heterostructures grown on Si(0.22)Ge(0.78) virtual substrates. The large compressive strain in the Ge quantum well layers caused by the lattice mismatch with the virtual substrate results in a blue shift of the direct absorption edge, as well as a reduction in the \Gamma-valley scattering lifetime because of strain-induced splittings of the conduction band valleys. We investigate theoretically the \Gamma-valley carrier lifetimes by evaluating the \Gamma-to-L and \Gamma-to-\Delta{} scattering rates in strained Ge/SiGe semiconductor heterostructures. These scattering rates are used to determine the lifetime broadening of excitonic peaks and the indirect absorption in simulated absorption spectra, which are compared with measured absorption spectra for quantum well structures with systematically-varied dimensions. We find that \Gamma-to-\Delta{} scattering is significant in compressively strained Ge quantum wells and that the \Gamma-valley electron lifetime is less than 50 fs in the highly-strained structures reported here, where \Gamma-to-\Delta{} scattering accounted for approximately half of the total scattering rate., Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures

Silicon-based terahertz quantum cascade lasers (QCLs) offer potential advantages over existing III-V devices. Although coherent electron transport effects are known to be important in QCLs, they have never been considered in Si-based device designs. We describe a density matrix transport model that is designed to be more general than those in previous studies and to require less a priori knowlege of electronic bandstructure, allowing its use in semi-automated design procedures. The basis of the model includes all states involved in interperiod transport, and our steady-state solution extends beyond the rotating-wave approximation by including DC and counter-propagating terms. We simulate the potential performance of bound-to-continuum Ge/SiGe QCLs and find that devices with 4-5-nm-thick barriers give the highest simulated optical gain. We also examine the effects of interdiffusion between Ge and SiGe layers; we show that if it is taken into account in the design, interdiffusion lengths of up to 1.5 nm do not significantly affect the simulated device performance., Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures

Silicon-based quantum cascade lasers (QCLs) offer the prospect of integrating coherent THz radiation sources with silicon microelectronics. Theoretical studies have proposed a variety of n-type SiGe-based heterostructures as design candidates, however the optimal material configuration remains unclear. In this work, an optimization algorithm is used to design equivalent THz QCLs in three recently-proposed configurations [(001) Ge/GeSi, (001) Si/SiGe and (111) Si/SiGe], with emission frequencies of 3 and 4 THz. A systematic comparison of the electronic and optical properties is presented. A semi-classical electron transport simulation is used to model the charge carrier dynamics and calculate the peak gain, the corresponding current density and the maximum operating temperature. It is shown that (001) Ge/GeSi structures yield the best simulated performance at both emission frequencies., Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures

Scattering rate calculations in two-dimensional Si/SiGe systems have typically been restricted to rectangular Ge profiles at interfaces between layers. Real interfaces, however, may exhibit diffuse Ge profiles either by design or as a limitation of the growth process. It is shown here that alloy disorder scattering dramatically increases with Ge interdiffusion in (100) and (111) n-type quantum wells, but remains almost constant in (100) p-type heterostructures. It is also shown that smoothing of the confining potential leads to large changes in subband energies and scattering rates, and a method is presented for calculating growth process tolerances., Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures

Although most work toward the realization of group IV quantum cascade lasers (QCLs) has focused on valence-band transitions, there are many desirable properties associated with the conduction band. We show that the commonly cited shortcomings of n-type Si/SiGe heterostructures can be overcome by moving to the (111) growth direction. Specifically, a large band offset and low effective mass are achievable and subband degeneracy is preserved. We predict net gain up to lattice temperatures of 90 K in a bound-to-continuum QCL with a double-metal waveguide, and show that a Ge interdiffusion length of at least 8 angstroms across interfaces is tolerable., Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures

Intervalley mixing between conduction-band states in low-dimensional Si/SiGe heterostructures induces splitting between nominally degenerate energy levels. The symmetric double-valley effective mass approximation and the empirical pseudopotential method are used to find the electronic states in different types of quantum wells. A reasonably good agreement between the two methods is found, with the former being much faster computationally. Aside from being an oscillatory function of well width, the splitting is found to be almost independent of in-plane wave vector, and an increasing function of the magnitude of interface gradient. While the model is defined for symmetric envelope potentials, it is shown to remain reasonably accurate for slightly asymmetric structures such as a double quantum well, making it acceptable for simulation of multilayer intersubband optical devices. Intersubband optical transitions are investigated under both approximations and it is shown that in most cases valley splitting causes linewidth broadening, although under extreme conditions, transition line doublets may result., Comment: 7 pages, 8 figures