Silicon possibilities

摘要

A team of researchers demonstrated a technique that offers the first possibility of silicon detectors for telecommunications. The Southampton University team's research, reported in Nature Materials, describes engineering the electronic band structure of laser-crystallised silicon photonic devices to help overcome one of the key challenges of using silicon in data communications. The laser-processing technique has been developed for the team's silicon optical fibre platform. It demonstrates that it is possible to completely crystallise the core material, while simultaneously writing in large stresses to modify the optoelectronic properties, achieving extreme bandgap reductions from l.lleV down to 0.59eV, enabling optical detection out to 2,100nm.