What is it about?
Photonic chips are the equivalent to electronic microchips, but working with light instead of electrons. They enable us to miniaturize systems that used to take up whole room to tiny fingernail-sized structures. Here we present a ring resonator that traps light with long wavelengths very efficiently, so called mid-infrared light. We achieve this using silicon-germanium as the chip material.
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Why is it important?
Ring resonators are critical components of sensor systems. If we can make mid-infrared sensors more efficient, yet smaller and cheaper, they can be used in a variety of applications, for example breath analysis in health care, monitoring air quality, or defense.
Perspectives
Next, we want to use the ring to generate something called a frequency comb. Frequency combs contain many equally spaced teeth, like conventional combs, but each tooth is a different frequency, or wavelength, of light. Their invention was honored with the 2005 Nobel prize. We cant to use mid-infrared frequency combs on our chips so that the sensing can be done at all the different comb colors and not only one wavelength, hence working for all the applications at once.
Marko Perestjuk
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This page is a summary of: Mid-infrared integrated silicon–germanium ring resonator with high Q-factor, APL Photonics, July 2023, American Institute of Physics,
DOI: 10.1063/5.0149324.
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