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      Broad-band optical parametric gain on a silicon photonic chip.

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          Abstract

          Developing an optical amplifier on silicon is essential for the success of silicon-on-insulator (SOI) photonic integrated circuits. Recently, optical gain with a 1-nm bandwidth was demonstrated using the Raman effect, which led to the demonstration of a Raman oscillator, lossless optical modulation and optically tunable slow light. A key strength of optical communications is the parallelism of information transfer and processing onto multiple wavelength channels. However, the relatively narrow Raman gain bandwidth only allows for amplification or generation of a single wavelength channel. If broad gain bandwidths were to be demonstrated on silicon, then an array of wavelength channels could be generated and processed, representing a critical advance for densely integrated photonic circuits. Here we demonstrate net on/off gain over a wavelength range of 28 nm through the optical process of phase-matched four-wave mixing in suitably designed SOI channel waveguides. We also demonstrate wavelength conversion in the range 1,511-1,591 nm with peak conversion efficiencies of +5.2 dB, which represents more than 20 times improvement on previous four-wave-mixing efficiencies in SOI waveguides. These advances allow for the implementation of dense wavelength division multiplexing in an all-silicon photonic integrated circuit. Additionally, all-optical delays, all-optical switches, optical signal regenerators and optical sources for quantum information technology, all demonstrated using four-wave mixing in silica fibres, can now be transferred to the SOI platform.

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          Author and article information

          Journal
          Nature
          Nature
          Springer Science and Business Media LLC
          1476-4687
          0028-0836
          Jun 22 2006
          : 441
          : 7096
          Affiliations
          [1 ] School of Applied and Engineering Physics, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853, USA.
          Article
          nature04932
          10.1038/nature04932
          16791190
          8c06c494-f726-4de2-a4fb-d04081218b8f
          History

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