Monolithic Saturable Absorber with Gallium Arsenide Nanowires Integrated on the Flexible Substrate for Optical Pulse Generation

Yifan Zhao, He Yang*, Vladislav Khayrudinov, Harri Lipsanen, Xinyang Su, Mei Qi, Baole Lu, Ningfang Song

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

1 Citation (Scopus)
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Abstract

In this work, we demonstrated a kind of flexibly monolithic saturable absorber (SA) with GaAs nanowires (NWs) on polyimide (PI) plastic substrate for broadband optical modulation at 1.0 and 1.5 µm, separately. The monolithic SA sample was prepared by the metalorganic vapor phase epitaxy (MOVPE) method. The crystal structure and element analysis were examined carefully by high-resolution scanning transmission electron microscopy (HRSTEM) and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX). We observed a high-density distribution of NWs on the flexible substrate by scanning electron microscopy (SEM). In addition, linear and nonlinear optical properties of the sample were examined by testing the photoluminescence and absorption properties, which showed its potential application as an optical switch due to the pure semiconducting properties. After the characterizations, we experimentally demonstrated this monolithic SA for laser modulation at 1.0 and 1.5 µm, which yielded the minimum optical pulse widths of 1.531 and 6.232 µs, respectively. Our work demonstrated such a kind of monolithic flexible NW substrate-integrated device used for broadband optical modulation, which not only eased the integration process of NWs onto the fiber endface, but also proved the potential of easily integrating with more semiconducting nanomaterials (e.g., graphene, MoS2, …) to realize monolithic active flexible photonic systems, such as a microscale phase modulator, delay-line, and so on, paving an easy avenue for the development of both active and flexible photonic devices.

Original languageEnglish
Article number1702
Number of pages11
JournalMicromachines
Volume14
Issue number9
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Sept 2023
MoE publication typeA1 Journal article-refereed

Keywords

  • flexible photonics
  • GaAs nanowires
  • nonlinear optical modulation
  • saturable absorber

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