Understanding photoluminescence in semiconductor Bragg-reflection waveguides

Abstract

Compared to traditional nonlinear optical crystals, like BaB₂O₄, KTiOPO₄ or LiNbO₃, semiconductor integrated sources of photon pairs may operate at pump wavelengths much closer to the bandgap of the materials. This is also the case for Bragg-reflection waveguides (BRW) targeting parametric down-conversion (PDC) to the telecom C-band. The large nonlinear coefficient of the AlGaAs alloy and the strong confinement of the light enable extremely bright integrated photon pair sources. However, under certain circumstances, a significant amount of detrimental broadband photoluminescence has been observed in BRWs. We show that this is mainly a result of linear absorption near the core and subsequent radiative recombination of electron-hole pairs at deep impurity levels in the semiconductor. For PDC with BRWs, we conclude that devices operating near the long wavelength end of the S-band or the short C-band require temporal filtering shorter than 1 ns. We predict that shifting the operating wavelengths to the L-band reduces the amount of photoluminescence by 70 % and making small adjustments in the material composition results in its total reduction of 90 %. Such measures enable us to increase the average pump power and/or the repetition rate, which makes integrated photon pair sources with on-chip multi-gigahertz pair rates feasible for future devices.