High-efficiency near-infrared emission from Bismuth-doped SiO0.73 thin films fabricated by ion implantation technology.

Over the past decade, the possibility of near-infrared light generation and amplification on chip has attracted great interest for future monolithic integrated optical components. In this Letter, we demonstrated a CMOS-compatible method to fabricate amorphous SiO0.73 thin films doped with Bi ions. It exhibited highly improved σem×τ of up to 4.2×10−23  cm2 s and greatly enhanced near-infrared characteristic emission originated from Bi ions by nearly 60 times via Si nanocrystal size control. We anticipated that this Bi-doped near-infrared light emitter would be a new starting point for future research in the field of optoelectronic integration.