Electrically-driven carbon nanotube-based plasmonic laser on silicon

Photonic signal processing requires efficient on-chip light sources with higher modulation bandwidths. Today’s conventional fastest semiconductor diode lasers exhibit modulation speeds only on the order of a few tens of GHz due to gain compression effects and parasitic electrical capacitances. Here we theoretically show an electrically-driven carbon nanotube (CNT)-based laser utilizing strong light-matter-interaction via monolithic integration into Silicon photonic crystal nanobeam (PCNB) cavities. The laser is formed by single-walled CNTs inside a combo-cavity consisting of both a plasmonic metal-oxide-semiconductor hybrid mode embedded in the one dimensional PCNB cavity. The emission originates from interband recombinations of electrostatically-doped nanotubes depending on the tubes’ chirality towards matching the C-band. 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