Donguk Nam
Seoul National University · Engineering
About the Lab
Professor Donguk Nam's research lab specializes in nanoscale photonics and optoelectronics, focusing on strain engineering and novel heterostructure design to advance group IV semiconductors—particularly germanium and silicon—for next-generation integrated photonic devices. The lab pioneers methods to achieve high biaxial and uniaxial strain in Ge and GeSn to enhance light emission and laser performance, while developing silicon-compatible light sources and high-quality nanophotonic cavities. A key innovation is the use of strain to create pseudoheterostructures in single-material nanowires, enabling custom-tailored electronic band profiles without complex epitaxial growth. The lab also explores symmetry-breaking in 2D materials like graphene through strain to unlock nonlinear optical effects such as second harmonic generation.
Research Overview
Research Output Trend
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Selected Papers
15This work presents a novel method to introduce a sustainable biaxial tensile strain larger than 1% in a thin Ge membrane using a stressor layer integrated on a Si substrate. Raman spectroscopy confirms 1.13% strain and photoluminescence shows a direct band gap reduction of 100meV with enhanced light emission efficiency. Simulation results predict that a combination of 1.1% strain and heavy n(+) doping reduces the required injected carrier density for population inversion by over a factor of 60.
Semiconductor heterostructures play a vital role in photonics and electronics. They are typically realized by growing layers of different materials, complicating fabrication and limiting the number of unique heterojunctions on a wafer. In this Letter, we present single-material nanowires which behave exactly like traditional heterostructures. These pseudoheterostructures have electronic band profiles that are custom-designed at the nanoscale by strain engineering. Since the band profile depends
A silicon-compatible light source is the final missing piece for completing high-speed, low-power on-chip optical interconnects. In this paper, we present a germanium nanowire light emitter that encompasses all the aspects of potential low-threshold lasers: highly strained germanium gain medium, strain-induced pseudoheterostructure, and high-Q nanophotonic cavity. Our nanowire structure presents greatly enhanced photoluminescence into cavity modes with measured quality factors of up to 2000. By
Despite the potential of graphene for building a variety of quantum photonic devices, its centrosymmetric nature forbids the observation of second harmonic generation (SHG) for developing second-order nonlinear devices. To activate SHG in graphene, extensive research efforts have been directed towards disrupting graphene's inversion symmetry using external stimuli like electric fields. However, these methods fail to engineer graphene's lattice symmetry, which is the root cause of the forbidden S
In this paper, we present a comprehensive study of carrier statistics in germanium with high uniaxial strain along the [100] direction. Several types of PL experiments were conducted to investigate polarization-, temperature- and excitation-dependent carrier statistics in germanium under various amounts of uniaxial strain. With the ability to clearly resolve multiple photoluminescence peaks originating from strain-induced valence band splitting, we experimentally observed strongly polarized ligh
Abstract GeSn alloys are promising candidates for complementary metal‐oxide‐semiconductor‐compatible, tunable lasers. Relaxation of residual compressive strain in epitaxial GeSn has recently shown promise in improving the lasing performance. However, the suspended device configuration that is thus far introduced to relax the strain is destined to limit heat dissipation, thus hindering the device performance. Herein is demonstrated that strain‐free GeSn microdisk laser devices fully released on S
The ability to precisely control moiré patterns in two-dimensional materials has enabled the realization of unprecedented physical phenomena including Mott insulators, unconventional superconductivity, and quantum emission. Along with the twist angle, the application of independent strain in each layer of stacked two-dimensional materials-termed heterostrain-has become a powerful means to manipulate the moiré potential landscapes. Recent experimental studies have demonstrated the possibility of
We report improved minority carrier lifetimes in n-type-doped and tensile-strained germanium by measuring direct bandgap photoluminescence from germanium-on-insulator substrates with various levels of defect density. We first describe a method to fabricate a high-quality germanium-on-insulator substrate by employing direct wafer bonding and chemical-mechanical polishing. Raman spectroscopy measurement was performed to assess the purity of the transferred layer on an insulator. Using time-resolve
Strained germanium nanowires have recently become an important material of choice for silicon-compatible optoelectronic devices. While the indirect bandgap nature of germanium had long been problematic both in light absorption and emission, recent successful demonstrations of bandstructure engineering by elastic strain have opened up the possibility of achieving direct bandgap in germanium, paving the way towards the realization of various high-performance optical devices integrated on a silicon
GeSn alloys offer a promising route towards a CMOS compatible light source and the realization of electronic-photonic integrated circuits. One tactic to improve the lasing performance of GeSn lasers is to use a high Sn content, which improves the directness. Another popular approach is to use a low to moderate Sn content with either compressive strain relaxation or tensile strain engineering, but these strain engineering techniques generally require optical cavities to be suspended in air, which
Two-dimensional (2D) materials-based photodetectors in the infrared range hold the key to enabling a wide range of optoelectronics applications including infrared imaging and optical communications. While there exist 2D materials with a narrow bandgap sensitive to infrared photons, a two-photon absorption (TPA) process can also enable infrared photodetection in well-established 2D materials with large bandgaps such as WSe<sub>2</sub> and MoS<sub>2</sub>. However, most of the TPA photodetectors s
Nanowires are promising platforms for realizing ultra-compact light sources for photonic integrated circuits. In contrast to impressive progress on light confinement and stimulated emission in III-V and II-VI semiconductor nanowires, there has been no experimental demonstration showing the potential to achieve strong cavity effects in a bottom-up grown single group-IV nanowire, which is a prerequisite for realizing silicon-compatible infrared nanolasers. Herein, we address this limitation and pr
Single-photon emitters (SPEs) hold the key to many quantum technologies including quantum computing. In particular, developing a scalable array of identical SPEs can play an important role in preparing single photons - crucial resources for computation - at a high rate, allowing to improve the computational capacity. Recently, different types of SPEs have been found in various 2D materials. Towards realizing scalable SPE arrays in 2D materials for quantum computation, it is required to develop t
Complementary metal oxide semiconductor-compatible short- and midwave infrared emitters are highly coveted for the monolithic integration of silicon-based photonic and electronic integrated circuits to serve a myriad of applications in sensing and communication. In this regard, the group IV germanium–tin (GeSn) material epitaxially grown on silicon (Si) emerges as a promising platform to implement tunable infrared light emitters. Indeed, upon increasing the Sn content, the bandgap of GeSn narrow
Research Areas
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