Towards on-chip TMD-based light source for silicon-based photonics interconnects

Silicon photonics is a promising platform for integrating various optical components on a single chip. However, one of the major challenges is to develop efficient and compact light sources due to the poor light emission efficiency of silicon. Semiconducting transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) shows great potential to address this issue by efficient band engineering with stacking of different TMD monolayers. In this work, we observe the bright-light emission from TMD heterobilayers (MoS₂/WSe₂), where interlayer excitons dominate the optical properties of materials even at room temperature. Through integrating the heterobilayers with silicon topological cavities, we observe a dominant single emission mode around 1230 nm that is outcoupled to an on-chip waveguide. Our work demonstrates a new architecture for realizing silicon photonic chip-scale integrated light sources at room temperature.