Ultraviolet frequency combs enable applications ranging from precision spectroscopy to atomic clocks by addressing electronic transitions of atoms and molecules. Access to ultraviolet light via integrated nonlinear optics is usually hampered by the strong material dispersion and large waveguide attention in ultraviolet regions. Here we demonstrate a simple route to chip-scale ultraviolet comb generators, simultaneously showing a gap-free frequency span of 128 terahertz and high conversion efficiency. This process relies on adiabatic quadratic frequency translation of a near-visible supercontinuum sourced by an ultrafast fiber laser. The simultaneous cubic and quadratic nonlinear processes are implemented in single-crystalline aluminum nitride thin films, where chirp-modulated taper waveguides are patterned to ensure a broad phase matching. The heterodyne characterization suggests that both the near-visible and ultraviolet supercontinuum combs maintain high coherence. Our approach is also adaptable to other non-centrosymmetric photonic platforms for ultrafast nonlinear optics with scalable bandwidth.

The effect of sapphire substrate's sidewall roughening on light extraction of AlGaN-based ultraviolet light-emitting diodes (UV LEDs) is investigated. Finite-difference time-domain simulation reveals that a roughening region for effective light extraction enhancement exists on the substrate's sidewall. Roughening outside the effective roughening region will result in undesirable inward photon scattering and absorption. For TM-polarization-dominated deep-UV LEDs, the effective roughening region is from the substrate's backside to the position about L/2 × tan(θ_c) away from the substrate's front side, where L is the side length of the LED device and θ_c is the critical angle of total reflection. In the LED device fabrication, picosecond laser dicing is employed to realize roughening layers on the sapphire substrate's sidewalls. The UV LEDs with three roughening layers have 13.2% higher average light output power (LOP) at 20 mA than those with two roughening layers, thanks to the larger roughening area in the effective roughening region. When additional roughening layers beyond the effective roughening region are applied, the LOP decreases as the simulation predicts. Furthermore, the values of leakage current and forward voltage of these LEDs are consistently below 0.2 μA at −10 V and 5.8–6.0 V at 20 mA, respectively, showing no thermal damage to intrinsic diode performance by the laser processing.

The heteroepitaxy of nitride semiconductors can be achieved without needing lattice matching between two material systems.

The energy-efficient deep ultraviolet (DUV) optoelectronic devices suffer from critical issues associated with the poor quality and large strain of nitride material system caused by the inherent mismatch of heteroepitaxy. In this work, we have prepared the strain-free AlN film with low dislocation density (DD) by graphene (Gr)-driving strain-pre-store engineering and a unique mechanism of strain-relaxation in quasi-van der Waals (QvdW) epitaxy is presented. The DD in AlN epilayer with Gr exhibits an anomalous sawtooth-like evolution during the whole epitaxy process. Gr can help to enable the annihilation of the dislocations originated from the interface between AlN and Gr/sapphire by impelling a lateral two-dimensional growth mode. Remarkably, it can induce AlN epilayer to pre-store sufficient tensile strain during the early growth stage and thus compensate the compressive strain caused by hetero-mismatch. Therefore, the low-strain state of the DUV light-emitting diode (DUV-LED) epitaxial structure is realized on the strain-free AlN template with Gr. Furthermore, the DUV-LED with Gr demonstrate 2.1 times enhancement of light output power and a better stability of luminous wavelength compared to that on bare sapphire. An in-depth understanding of this work reveals diverse beneficial impacts of Gr on nitride growth and provides a novel strategy of relaxing the vital requirements of hetero-mismatch in conventional heteroepitaxy.

Avalanche photodiode (APD) has been intensively investigated as a promising candidate to replace the bulky and fragile photomultiplier tube (PMT) for weak light detection. However, the performance of most available APDs is barely satisfactory compared to that of the PMTs because of inter-valley scattering. Here, we demonstrate a PMT-like APD based on GaN/AlN periodically stacked-structure (PSS), in which the electrons encounter a much less inter-valley scattering during transport than holes. Uni-directional avalanche takes place with a high efficiency. According to our simulations based on a PSS with GaN (10 nm)/AlN (10 nm) in each period, the probability for electrons to trigger ionization in each cycle can reach as high as 80%, while that for holes is only 4%. A record high and stable gain (10⁴) with a low ionization coefficient ratio of 0.05 is demonstrated under a constant bias in a prototype device.

The growth mechanism and dislocation behavior of AlN on monolayer hBN materials without/with O₂plasma treatment by MOCVD.