1.3μm Ill-nitride nanowire monolithic diode lasers and photonic integrated circuits on (001) silicon

There has been a great deal of attention paid recently to GaN-based nanowires and nanowire heterostructures for their unique materials properties and the potential to realize unique and useful devices with them. They can be epitaxially grown on a variety of substrates, including the technologically important (001)Si. Most importantly, the polarization field and density of extended defects in the nanowires are smaller than those in planar heterostructures. The density of surface states on the nanowire walls is also small and ~10
³
cm
^-2
. The area density of the nanowire arrays can be varied in the range of 10
⁹
-10
¹¹
cm
^-2
. These nanowires have therefore presented a new III-nitride based technology which allows the realization of light sources emitting in the `green gap' and beyond. The active light-emitting region in the nanowires are usually InGaN disks, whose composition can be varied to tune the emission wavelength. Detailed studies have revealed that a single quantum dot is formed in the InGaN disk region.