Midinfrared supercontinuum generation from 2 to 6 μm in a silicon nanowire

Silicon has attracted great interest as a platform for both linear and nonlinear integrated photonics for over 15 years. While its primary applications have been in the telecom window (near 1.5 mu m), the capability of exploiting its full transparency window to 8 mu m in the mid-IR is highly attractive, since this will open it up to entirely new applications in fields such as spectroscopy, chemical and biological sensing, and free-space communications. However, while silicon-on-insulator has shown great promise just beyond the