Development of an external cavity quantum cascade laser spectrometer at 7.5 μm for gas detection

We report the development of an external cavity quantum cascade laser spectrometer at 7.5 μm. The quantum cascade laser and its anti-reflection coating were specially developed for this application. We provide details of the external cavity design and data processing. A continuous wave emission is demonstrated from 1,293 up to 1,350 cm^?1. A preliminary test of the spectrometer was realized by measurements on acetone and phosphoryl chloride.     

Ultracompact and silicon-on-insulator-compatible polarization splitter based on asymmetric plasmonic–dielectric coupling

An ultracompact and silicon-on-insulator-compatible polarization splitter (PS) is proposed by utilizing asymmetric directional coupling between a hybrid plasmonic waveguide and a strip dielectric waveguide. Owing to the plasmon-assisted asymmetry, birefringence is highly enhanced. Polarization splitting can be realized by strong coupling of one polarization while the other polarization is phase-mismatched. As an example, a PS based on strong TM coupling is demonstrated at the wavelength of 1.55 μm with a coupling length of 4.13 μm. Extinction ratios are 20.9 and 16.4 dB for TM and TE polarizations, respectively. The device is also broadband and fabrication-tolerant.     

Mid-infrared fiber-coupled QCL-QEPAS sensor

An innovative spectroscopic system based on an external cavity quantum cascade laser (EC-QCL) coupled with a mid-infrared (mid-IR) fiber and quartz enhanced photoacoustic spectroscopy (QEPAS) is described. SF₆ has been selected as a target gas in demonstration of the system for trace gas sensing. Single mode laser delivery through the prongs of the quartz tuning fork has been obtained employing a hollow waveguide fiber with inner silver–silver iodine (Ag–AgI) coatings and internal core diameter of 300 μm. A detailed design and realization of the QCL fiber coupling and output collimator system allowed almost practically all (99.4 %) of the laser beam to be transmitted through the spectrophone module. The achieved sensitivity of the system is 50 parts per trillion in 1 s, corresponding to a record for QEPAS normalized noise-equivalent absorption of 2.7 × 10^?10 W cm^?1 Hz^?1/2.     

Cavity-enhanced optical feedback-assisted photo-acoustic spectroscopy with a 10.4 μm external cavity quantum cascade laser

An ultra-sensitive photo-acoustic spectrometer using a 10.4 μm broadly tunable mid-IR external cavity quantum cascade laser (EC-QCL) coupled with optical feedback to an optical power buildup cavity with high reflectivity mirrors was developed and tested. A laser optical power buildup factor of 181 was achieved, which corresponds to an intra-cavity power of 9.6 W at a wavelength of 10.4 μm. With a photo-acoustic resonance cell placed inside the cavity this resulted in the noise-equivalent absorption coefficient of 1.9 × 10^?10 cm^?1 Hz^?1/2, and a normalized noise-equivalent absorption of 1.1 × 10^?11 cm^?1 W Hz^?1/2. A novel photo-acoustic signal normalization technique makes the photo-acoustic spectrometer’s response immune to changes and drifts in the EC-QCL excitation power, EC-QCL to cavity coupling efficiency and cavity mirrors aging and contamination. An automatic lock of the EC-QCL to the cavity and optical feedback phase optimization permitted long wavelength scans within the entire EC-QCL spectral tuning range.     

Coupling external cavity mid-IR quantum cascade lasers with low loss hollow metallic/dielectric waveguides

We report on the optical coupling between hollow core waveguides and external cavity mid-IR quantum cascade lasers (QCLs). Waveguides with 1000???m bore size and lengths ranging from 2 to 14?cm, with metallic (Ag)/dielectric (AgI or polystyrene) circular cross-section internal coatings, have been employed. Our results show that the QCL mode is perfectly matched to the hybrid HE₁₁ waveguide mode, demonstrating that the internal dielectric coating thickness is effective to suppress the higher losses TE-like modes. Optical losses down to 0.44?dB/m at 5.27???m were measured in Ag/polystyrene-coated waveguide with an almost unitary coupling efficiency.     

An efficient directional coupling from dielectric waveguide to hybrid long-range plasmonic waveguide on a silicon platform

The silicon-based three-dimensional hybrid long-range plasmonic waveguide not only supports long-range propagation distance (~mm) but also has an ultra-small modal area (~10^?2 μm²) at 1.55 μm. Here, we propose a directional coupler for effective coupling from a dielectric slab-waveguide to the hybrid plasmonic waveguide on a silicon platform. Our simulation results show that the coupler is able to excite hybrid long-range plasmonic mode with short coupling length, low insertion loss, and high extinction ratio. With the arm separation of 0.3 μm, the coupling length can be made 5.2 % of the propagation length of the hybrid plasmonic waveguide, while the insertion loss and extinction ratio are ?0.12 and 22.4 dB, respectively. This coupler offers the potential applications in signal routing between the hybrid long-range plasmonic waveguide and dielectric waveguide in the photonic integrated circuits.     

Numerical simulation of low loss silicon photonic wire waveguide with multiple cladding layers

A different silicon photonic wire waveguide is proposed, which uses multiple thin cladding layers in order to reduce the index contrast between core and cladding interface. The reduced index contrast in the proposed waveguide has led to reduction in the scattering losses by 37% as compared to silicon wire waveguide for 400 nm × 220 nm waveguide dimension. The proposed waveguide has shown significant reduction in bending losses. It offers the bending loss of 0.0118 dB at the radius of 1 μm and 0.0063 dB for a radius of 2 μm at 1.55 μm wavelength as compared to 0.086 and 0.013 dB at the radius of 1 and 2 μm, respectively, offered by silicon photonic wire waveguide at 1.5 μm wavelength. The use of polymer material as top cladding layer resulted in decreasing the sensitivity of effective index against temperature for the designed waveguide by a factor of 2 as compared to silicon wire waveguide.     

Direct determination of glucose, lactate and triglycerides in blood serum by a tunable quantum cascade laser-based mid-IR sensor

This work reports on a compact sensor for fast and reagent-free point-of-care determination of glucose, lactate and triglycerides in blood serum based on a tunable (1030–1230 cm^?1) external-cavity quantum cascade laser (EC-QCL). For simple and robust operation a single beam set-up was designed and only thermoelectric cooling was used for the employed laser and detector. Full computer control of analysis including liquid handling and data analysis facilitated routine measurements. A high optical pathlength (>100 μm) is a prerequisite for robust measurements in clinical practice. Hence, the optimum optical pathlength for transmission measurements in aqueous solution was considered in theory and experiment. The experimentally determined maximum signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) was around 140 μm for the QCL blood sensor and around 50 μm for a standard FT-IR spectrometer employing a liquid nitrogen cooled mercury cadmium telluride (MCT) detector. A single absorption spectrum was used to calculate the analyte concentrations simultaneously by using a partial-least-squares (PLS) regression analysis. Glucose was determined in blood serum with a prediction error (RMSEP) of 6.9 mg/dl and triglycerides with an error of cross-validation (RMSECV) of 17.5 mg/dl in a set of 42 different patients. In spiked serum samples the lactate concentration could be determined with an RMSECV of 8.9 mg/dl.     

Coupling and crosstalk characteristics of hybrid silicon plasmonic waveguides

In this paper, the design and analysis of an ultracompact coupler based on a hybrid silicon plasmonic waveguide (HSPW) is proposed and its coupling and crosstalk characteristics have been theoretically investigated for the development of optical interconnects that can be realized using well-established complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor-compatible fabrication techniques. To determine the minimum horizontal separation distance and efficient coupling length for the designed coupler, the symmetric and antisymmetric supermodes are obtained and their characteristics are studied at a wavelength of 1.55 μm. Efficient light coupling is exhibited by the HSPW coupler with 75 % of power transfer between the two HSPWs with ultrashort coupling length of 2.14 μm when the separation distance is 50 nm. Further, it is shown that the crosstalk is significantly reduced with the insertion of metallic strip between the two HSPWs for realizing highly dense integrated plasmonic circuits.     

Short-length and broadband mismatched optical couplers with tapered Hamming function for C- and L-band

Mismatched optical couplers with variable widths of waveguide tapered by Hamming function are numerically investigated in the demand of short-length, broadband, and low crosstalk. We used global search algorithm and beam propagation method to seek optimal structure parameters of coupling waveguide. The coupler length is 3.6 mm within the C+L-band (1.53-1.61 μm) for variable widths of waveguide at crosstalk level of −35 dB. Comparison with constant width of waveguide, the constant width of waveguide has a coupler length of 4.4 mm and can only achieve −20 dB of crosstalk within the C-band (1.53-1.565 μm). Obviously, the waveguide with variable widths has the advantage over constant width for the demand of short-length, bandwidth, and low-crosstalk.     

Jet-cooled infrared spectra of molecules and complexes with a cw mode-hop-free external-cavity QCL and a distributed-feedback QCL

The coupling of quantum cascade lasers (QCLs) with an off-axis cavity enhanced absorption (CEA) spectrometer and an astigmatic multiple pass absorption (MPA) spectrometer are described in this paper. A continuous wave (cw) liquid nitrogen cooled distributed-feedback QCL at 5.7 μm and a cw room temperature mode-hop-free external-cavity QCL at 6.1 μm were employed as the light source. For the CEA spectrometer, the effects of mirror size and laser scan rate were evaluated. For the MPA spectrometer, a pair of astigmatic mirrors with a 55 cm mirror distance was aligned to the 366-pass configuration. The jet-cooled samples were generated using a homemade pulsed slit jet nozzle assembly. Two LabVIEW programs were written to automate and synchronize the timing of the laser scan, the pulsed slit jet molecular expansion, and the data acquisition. Infrared spectra of jet-cooled methyl lactate and the Ar–H₂O complex and room temperature N₂O and NH₃ samples were measured using both the rapid scan and the wavelength modulation methods to evaluate the sensitivity and resolution of the CEA and MPA spectrometers. The combination of the MPA spectrometer with the external-cavity QCL using the rapid scan method was found to be the best suited combination to measure high resolution jet-cooled infrared spectra.     

Broadly tunable quantum cascade laser in cantilever-enhanced photoacoustic infrared spectroscopy of solids

An external cavity quantum cascade laser (EC-QCL) is applied in the photoacoustic detection of solid samples. The EC-QCL used has a broad tuning range of 676 cm^?1 (970–1,646 cm^?1) in the mid-infrared region, which enables accurate broadband spectroscopy of large molecules. The high spectral power density of the EC-QCL is combined with an extremely sensitive optical cantilever microphone of the photoacoustic detector to achieve an ultimate sensitivity. The carbon black, polyethylene, and hair fiber samples were measured with the EC-QCL photoacoustic detection using electrical amplitude modulation to demonstrate the possibilities of the setup. The same measurements were repeated with a Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectrometer combined with a photoacoustic detector for a comparison. The EC-QCL photoacoustic setup yielded roughly a decade better signal-to-noise ratios than the FTIR setup with the same measurement time.     

Simplified Approach for Optimizing Optical Asymmetric Curved Waveguides of Broadband Directional Couplers

ABSTRACT

Optical broadband directional couplers (BDCs) are indispensable components for providing wavelength-insensitive and flexible optical splitting in the construction of functional photonic integrated circuits (PICs). The existing BDC device structures are usually required to determine specific design parameters for different waveguide structures and operating wavelength bands. To circumvent this dilemma, here we present a novel optimization procedure to realize a compact BDC by using the asymmetric curved waveguide structure. The versatile particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique is adopted to determine the optimal device parameters of the compact and broadband asymmetric curved directional couplers (ACDCs) for different coupling ratios. In order to reduce the computational complexity in the optimization, the 3D ACDC is first converted to an equivalent 2D structure by using the modified effective index method (MEIM). The device parameters of the equivalent 2D ACDC are optimized by the PSO with the objective function of a wavelength flattened coupling ratio. Afterward, the optimized 2D structure is converted to the 3D one by including the waveguide thickness. To cope with the approximation error by the MEIM, the 3D ACDC is further fine-tuned by sweeping one of the device parameters with the full 3D simulation but keeping all of the other optimal parameters obtained from the PSO intact. As a result, a DC with broad bandwidth of 100 nm is obtained over the wavelength range from 1.50 µm to 1.60 µm with a very small coupling length of 6 µm. The semi-optimized ACDC is used to construct an unbalanced Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) and a Sagnac loop mirror (SLM), both of which show high extinction ratios of >25 dB over a broad wavelength range with low excess loss.     

A quantum cascade laser-based optical feedback cavity-enhanced absorption spectrometer for the simultaneous measurement of CH4 and N2O in air

Optical feedback cavity-enhanced absorption spectroscopy (OF CEAS) has been demonstrated with a thermoelectrically cooled continuous wave distributed feedback quantum cascade laser (QCL) operating at wavelengths around 7.84 μm. The QCL is coupled to an optical cavity which creates an absorption pathlength greater than 1000 m. The experimental design allows optical feedback of infra-red light, resonant within the cavity, to the QCL, which initiates self-locking at each TEM₀₀ cavity mode frequency excited. The QCL linewidth is narrowed to below the mode linewidth, greatly increasing the efficiency of injection of light into the cavity. At the frequency of each longitudinal cavity mode, the absorption coefficient of an intracavity sample is obtained from the transmission at the mode maximum, measured with a thermoelectrically cooled detector: spectral line profiles of CH₄ and N₂O in ambient air were recorded simultaneously and with a resolution of 0.01386 cm^?1. A minimum detectable absorption coefficient of 5.5×10^?8 cm^?1 was demonstrated after an averaging time of 1 s for this completely thermoelectrically cooled system. The bandwidth-normalised limit for a single cavity mode is 5.6×10^?9 cm^?1?Hz^?1/2 (1σ).     

Optical matching layer structures in evanescent coupling photodiodes at a wavelength of 1.55μm： physics,design and simulation

We have studied the optical matching layers (OMLs) and external quantum efficiency in the evanescent coupling photodiodes (ECPDs) integrating a diluted waveguide as a fibre-to-waveguide coupler, by using the semi-vectorial beam propagation method (BPM). The physical basis of OML has been identified, thereby a general designing rule of OML is developed in such a kind of photodiode. In addition, the external quantum efficiency and the polarization sensitivity versus the absorption and coupling length are analysed. With an optical matching layer, the absorption medium with a length of 30μm could absorb 90% of the incident light at 1.55μm wavelength, thus the total absorption increases more than 7 times over that of the photodiode without any optical matching layer.     

Sub-Doppler spectroscopy with an external cavity quantum cascade laser

The linewidth of an external cavity quantum cascade laser is studied as a function of injection current and laser scan rate. The laser linewidth is inferred to be ca. 2.5 MHz from Lamb-dip spectra on a low pressure sample of NO and its variation with injection current is well modeled using literature values for the intrinsic material properties of the lasing medium. The laser linewidth measurements are corroborated by polarization spectroscopy studies as well as by analysis of hyperfine structure and cross-over resonances.     

金属有机化学气相外延生长1310nm偏振无关混合应变量子阱半导体光放大器研究

采用低压金属有机化学气相外延设备进行了1.3μm压应变量子阱材料、张应变量子阱材料和混合应变量子阱材料的生长研究.通过x射线双晶衍射和光致发光谱对生长材料进行测试和分析.基于四个压应变量子阱和三个张应变量子阱交替生长的混合应变量子阱（4CW3TW）结构有源区，并采用7°斜腔脊型波导结构以有效抑制腔面反射，经蒸镀减反膜后，半导体光放大器光纤光纤小信号增益达21.5dB，在1280—1340nm波长范围内偏振灵敏度小于0.6dB. 关键词： 偏振无关 应变量子阱 半导体光放大器 减反膜     

A 3D-CMOS compatible silicon photo-sensor with a large vertical photosensitive area

This paper introduces design and simulation of a three-dimensional complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor CMOS compatible photo-sensor based on a silicon substrate. In the structure of photo-sensor, a vertical n+/p junction as a photosensitive area is formed on one side of a U-groove, and perpendicular to a lateral n-i-p structure on top-side of the silicon surface. This configuration enables a direct butt-coupling of a fiber-optic to the photosensitive area, which is a privilege for many remote monitoring applications. The device analysis is carried out by a two-dimensional simulation using SILVACO TCAD simulator. The thickness of the photo-sensitive area is investigated by considering the figures of merit for the two different thicknesses of 30 and 50 µm. The simulated results (according to the parameters defined for the Si substrate) show a very low dark current of 70 and 100 (fA/μm) for the 30 and 50 µm thicknesses, respectively. In addition, a high photo-current to dark current ratio of ~3000 is achieved under an intensity of 2 mW/cm² at 633 nm wavelength, according to the wavelength of red He–Ne laser. The sensor demonstrates a responsivity of 0.33 A/W corresponding to 65% external quantum efficiency and a ?3 dB frequency response of 0.2 GHz under a small signal of 2 mW/cm² at 633 nm wavelength for 10 V reverse bias.     

Design of micro resonator quantum well intensity modulator

A compact rectangular resonator quantum well intensity modulator for operation in the wavelength band around 1?μm is described. The modulator is realized using InGaAs/GaAs modulation-doped quantum wells and operates on the principles of index change caused by blue shifts of the absorption edge. High efficiency 90° bends are used to form the resonator and to provide optimal coupling to the external waveguide. The benefits are to reduce loss, to relax the lithography requirements and to provide more flexible contact designs to the modulator. The characteristics of the modulator are analyzed using MATLAB and FDTD simulation tools with refractive index profiles based on measured absorption parameters. A model including parasitics is developed for HSPICE transient simulations and is run in the AGILENT ADS environment. The performance parameters are determined to be an extinction ratio of 10.4 dB, a bandwidth of 33?GHz, and a dc power less than 1 mW for device dimensions of 16?×?6?μm².     

差频可调谐太赫兹技术的新进展

太赫兹技术在最近30年来得到快速发展, 并在医学、生物、农业、材料、安检、通信、天文等领域得到广泛应用. 从太赫兹源的频谱特性可以分为窄带(单频)太赫兹源和宽带太赫兹源. 从频谱技术方面来说, 相干的宽带和窄带太赫兹谱是一种互补性关系, 具有各自的技术特点和应用范围. 宽带太赫兹谱可以用于快速获取较宽频谱范围的分子振转谱, 实现混合特征谱的快速检测或成像. 窄带太赫兹源具有很好的光谱灵敏度和分辨率, 适用于太赫兹抽运-探测、分子振转能级谱精细结构分辨 以及太赫兹远程探测和成像. 因此研制具有可调谐的高峰值功率的窄带太赫兹源是适用于探测和识别分子振转能级指纹谱的应用需求, 而差频技术是获得高功率和宽调谐窄带太赫兹源最重要的技术之一. 为了突出该技术的最新进展, 本综述引证论文仅仅限于近5 年来基于差频技术产生太赫兹波的研究进展, 分为光学激光差频源和量子级联激光器差频源两大部分. 对于光学激光差频源, 分别对目前文献报道的各种双波长差频源和太赫兹产生用的非线性晶体进行分类介绍, 并给出所采用的技术和实验结果; 对于量子级联激光器差频源, 分别介绍了量子级联激光器中的差频产生技术和波长调谐技术的最新进展. 量子级联激光器差频太赫兹源是目前实现量子级联激光器在太赫兹波段室温运转的惟一技术, 是实现小型化、窄带宽调谐和室温运转太赫兹源的新发展领域, 值得关注.