Infrared Semiconducting Transition-Metal Dichalcogenide Lasing with a Silicon Nanocavity

The remaining challenge for silicon photonics is creating a light-emitter on chip. Recently, a special group of two-dimensional materials, semiconducting transition-metal dichalcogenides, have been developed. These materials demonstrate unique electronic properties and excellent optoelectronic performance, opening up new possibilities to finally overcome this challenge. In this letter, we report a novel nano-scale silicon laser source, which was achieved by combining a far-field optimized silicon photonic crystal cavity and a two-dimensional gain material, tri-layer molybdenum ditelluride. When an optical continuous-wave pump was employed, the maximum lasing output power obtained was at a wavelength of 1080 nm. Such output power shows that this novel source has great potential for use in on-chip optical communication.