Enhanced amplified spontaneous emission from conjugated light-emitting polymer integrated with silicon nitride grating structures

Conjugated light-emitting polymer materials have demonstrated many useful photonic applications, attracting a lot of research interest in recent years. In this work, we present a novel hybrid photonic platform based on conjugated polymer Poly[2-(2',5⁰-bis(2”-ethylhexyloxy)phenyl) −1,4phenylene vinylene] (BEHP-PPV) integrated with a silicon nitride (SiN_x) grating. By directly growing a low temperature SiN_x layer on the thin organic polymer film, the degradation of organic polymer is significantly minimized. More importantly, the grating structure can effectively improve the amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) properties, reducing the threshold of ASE by up to 60%. These results demonstrated that the hybrid integration of light-emitting polymer with the SiN_x grating is an effective solution to combine cost-effective and easy-to-process organic photonic materials with high-performance inorganic dielectric nanostructures, which could find many applications in the future.