Heterogeneously integrated silicon photonics for the mid-infrared and spectroscopic sensing

Besides being the foundational material for microelectronics, in optics, crystalline silicon has long been used for making infrared lenses and mirrors. More recently, silicon has become the key material to achieve large-scale integration of photonic devices for optical interconnect and telecommunication. For optics, silicon has significant advantages: it offers a very high refractive index and is highly transparent in the spectral range from 1.2 to 8 micron. To fully exploit silicon’s superior performance in a remarkably broad range and to enable new optoelectronic functionalities, here we describe a general method to integrate silicon photonic devices on arbitrary substrates. In particular, we apply the technique to successfully integrate silicon micro-ring resonators on mid-infrared compatible substrates for operation in the mid-infrared. These high-performance mid-infrared optical resonators are utilized to demonstrate, for the first time, on-chip cavity-enhanced mid-infrared spectroscopic analysis of organic chemicals with a limit of detection of less than 0.1 ng.