Massimo Cazzanelli

TL;DR: It is shown that a sizeable second-order nonlinearity at optical wavelengths is induced in a silicon waveguide by using a stressing silicon nitride overlayer and envisage that nonlinear strained silicon could provide a competing platform for a new class of integrated light sources spanning the near- to mid-infrared spectrum from 1.2 to 10 μm.

TL;DR: In this article, photoluminescence lifetimes and optical absorption cross sections of Si nanocrystals embedded in SiO 2 have been studied as a function of their average size and emission energy.

TL;DR: In this article, time-resolved luminescence measurements on silicon nanocrystal waveguides obtained by thermal annealing of plasma-enhanced chemical-vapor-deposited thin layers of silicon-rich oxide have revealed fast recombination dynamics related to population inversion which leads to net optical gain.

TL;DR: In this article, the conditions under which optical gain is measured in nanocrystalline silicon (nc-Si) using the variable stripe length method were studied, and it was shown that the presence of nc-Si is necessary to achieve gain in our structures.

TL;DR: In this article, the validity of the variable stripe length (VSL) method to measure optical gain in semiconductor materials was discussed and the main experimental as well as conceptual difficulties arising when the VSL method is barely applied to low gain materials such as silicon nanocrystals (Si-nc) devised in a planar waveguide geometry.