Abstract

Electrically driven high-speed light emitters based on compound semiconductors are widely used in the areas of optical communication, time-resolved spectroscopy, etc. However, because of their large footprints, the low crystal-linity of the compound semiconductors grown directly on Si wafers, these emitters face significant challenges with respect to their integration with silicon-based electronics, photonics and micromechanical platforms. Single-walled carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are an attractive material for optical and optoelectronic applications, such as optically and electrically excited light sources. Electrically driven CNT emitters, which can be based on electron-hole recombination or blackbody radiation, have several advantages: (i) a small footprint emitter can easily be obtained due to its simple fabrication process, (ii) CNTs can be prepared directly on a Si wafer, unlike compound semiconductor-based light emitters. These advantages could open new routes to photonics or optoelectronics integrated with silicon-based electronics. However, for such applications, the question remains as to whether an electrically driven CNT emitter can be modulated at high frequency as well as compound-semiconductor LEDs and LDs, which have modulation speeds on the order of MHz to GHz. In this study, we report the first electrically driven, ultra-high-speed CNT light emitter based on blackbody emission. Although these emission properties have been studied under steady-state conditions, the transient properties of these emitters have not been reported to date.

© 2014 Japan Society of Applied Physics, Optical Society of America