On-Chip Octave-Spanning Supercontinuum in Nanostructured Silicon Waveguides Using Ultralow Pulse Energy

We present an approach for generating an octave-spanning supercontinuum on a silicon chip using input pulse energy as low as 6.8 pJ. This is enabled by advanced dispersion engineering with a nanoscale slot structure. We analyze the performance of the supercontinuum generation in terms of bandwidth, spectral coherence, and flatness, under different operating conditions. We show that, accompanying with the spectral broadening, the input pulse is compressed to 12 fs, which opens an opportunity for on-chip few-cycle pulse generation.