Microcavity devices
By light confinement in small volumes with resonant recirculation, microcavity lasers promise to complement the rise of Si photonics by populating these chips with extreme small size.
Overview
By light confinement in small volumes with resonant recirculation, microcavity lasers promise to complement the rise of Si photonics by populating these chips with small-footprint and low-threshold light sources. The dense, energetically confined, and spatially isolated QD gain medium is utilized for circumventing crystal defects in heteroepitaxy, as well as for scaling to ultra-small dimensions in microcavities. The former allows for laser growth and processing up to 450 mm Si wafer with minimal compromise in light emission efficiency, and the latter enables device miniaturization for ultra-dense photonic integration with complex functionality and economy of scale. We work with technological demonstrations of QD microcavity devices, and the mission is to use III–V/Si epitaxy to form a bandwidth scale-up, energy scale down, volume manufacturable Si photonics solution.
Please check the book chapter that has been selected as cover of the book “Future Directions in Silicon Photonics”
Y. Wan, J. Norman, and J. E. Bowers, “Quantum dot microcavity lasers”. Future Directions in Silicon Photonics (2019): 305.
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Principal Investigators
Biography
Dr. Yating Wan is an Assistant Professor at KAUST, specializing in Silicon Photonics with a focus on integrating on-chip light sources that can be applied to data communication, optical computing, OPA based lidar, and quantum information processing. She earned her Ph.D. in 2017 from HKUST (supervised by Prof. Kei May Lau). From 2016 to 2022, she worked at UCSB (supervised by Prof. John Bowers), where she led Intel’s project on heterogeneously integrated quantum dot lasers, making significant contributions to Si CMOS-compatible light sources.
Dr. Wan has authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications, including 29 first-author journal papers (10 as covers), 7 corresponding-author journal papers, and >20 invited talks in international conferences. With over 3,500 citations and an h-index of 33, her research has received prestigious awards, including HKUST PhD Research Excellence Award (2017), PIERS Young Scientist Award (2018), CLEO Tingye Li Innovation Prize (2021), Rising Stars of Light by Light: Science & Applications (2022), MIT Technology Review's "35 Innovators Under 35 for China" (2023), Optica Ambassador (2024), and Sony Women in Technology Award with Nature (2025).
Outside of her immediate research spectrum, Dr. Wan has been a proactive contributor to the broader academic community. She is the Manager & Column Editor for the LSA Editorial Office in Thuwal, Associate editor in Applied Optics, IEEE JQE, guest associate editor in IEEE JSTQE, TPC of IPC and CLEO, and Committee Member of the IEEE Photonics Society (IPS) Conference Council. She has also been a referee for a myriad of prestigious journals, spanning IEEE, OSA, and the Nature Publishing Group more than 100 times.
Research Interests
An expert in silicon photonics, Dr. Wan specializes in on-chip light source integration. Her research extends to data communication, optical computing and quantum information processing.
She is renowned for integrating long-wavelength quantum dot devices on silicon.