Room-Temperature Lasing from Monolithically Integrated GaAs Microdisks on Silicon

Additional functionalities on semiconductor microchips are progressively important in order to keep up with the ever-increasing demand for more powerful computational systems. Monolithic III–V integration on Si promises to merge mature Si CMOS processing technology with III–V semiconductors possessing superior material properties, e.g., in terms of carrier mobility or band structure (direct band gap). In particular, Si photonics would strongly benefit from an integration scheme for active III–V optoelectronic devices in order to enable low-cost and power-efficient electronic–photonic integrated circuits. We report on room-temperature lasing from AlGaAs/GaAs microdisk cavities monolithically integrated on Si(001) using a selective epitaxial growth technique called template-assisted selective epitaxy. The grown gain material possesses high optical quality without indication of threading dislocations, antiphase boundaries, or twin defects. The devices exhibit single-mode lasing at T < 250 K and lasing thresholds between 2 and 18 pJ/pulse depending on the cavity size (1–3 μm in diameter).